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Evolution – Smevolution!

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Section 2

Punctuated Equilibrium

Frequent large jumps or gaps in the fossil record commonly (and erroneously) referred to as punctuated equilibrium tell us that at times whole sets of complex features appear to have been proposed and achieved in a single step.[129] The historical path evolution is seen to have taken is thus not the expectation of gradualism entailed by the accidental neo-Darwinian model, and it is a much more difficult path for accident to achieve. The reality of punctuated equilibrium pushes the improbability of an accidental process farther beyond the already prohibitive magnitudes we have been discussing by making the incremental component steps of evolution much larger and more complex. This means that the few very small changes that can be observed in the lab, alterations to a few amino acids or a simple bacterial gene mutation are no longer valid demonstrations of the ability of an accidental process to accomplish the evolutionary steps depicted in the fossil record. Thus, we are left with no directly observable changes of the type needed to accomplish progressive macroevolution.

Multiple proteins, probably hundreds, must be created or modified and combined in complex ways with other components to achieve a functional design innovation of the magnitude needed for the jumps of punctuated equilibrium. The actual rate of failure of an accidental process in attempting the steps of evolution should then be, not 10⁷⁷ to 1, which is merely the failure rate for accidentally arriving at a single viable protein (as if that weren’t enough to defeat the theory), but 10⁷⁷ X 10⁷⁷ X 10⁷⁷ X 10⁷⁷ X 10⁷⁷ X 10⁷⁷… (continued to hundreds of multiplicands) to 1! The universe has had neither the time nor the resources to do this (see Appendix 2).

The frequent rapid jumps in the fossil record are postulated by punctuationists to arise from the geographical isolation of small to moderate sized populations. Both the isolation and the smaller population are thought to make it more likely that a radically new feature could both emerge by loss of genomic cohesion factors and avoid being overwhelmed by subsequent re-emersion into the genomes of the host population, that is, avoid being blended back into the standardized genetics via reproductive mixing. While isolation of a small subpopulation does give novelty a better chance to survive if it occurs, biological form change novelties of the size and complexity represented by the punctuated jumps actually seen in the fossil record are simply not going to be proposed by accident. Even if isolation can ultimately be shown to have consistently occurred through the history of evolution at the point of the emergence of new traits (this has not been done), the fact will remain that an accidental process could not have arranged such an unlikely convergence of astronomically improbable events in so regular a fashion, that is, greater than 300,000,000 times. The fact that any change that is accidentally achieved stands a better chance of surviving the Mendelian eraser inherent in interbreeding with a larger population does not help the problem of lack of a sufficient statistical base from which to first generate the change randomly (assuming such things can be done randomly at all).

Ernst Mayr thought that the cohesive factors that normally retard rapid change of the genome will loosen when small interbreeding populations are geographically isolated. The loosening of constraints on rapid genomic change would then, in Mayr’s view, counterbalance the loss of most of the routine genetic variations due to reduced population size sufficiently to promote the emergence of radical new features. But this seems to involve the abandoning of the assumption of random mutation as the source of the new features. It implies that the biological information or the ability to generate that information well beyond random parameters are already there and just need an opportunity to get out. Mayr apparently didn’t see the need to draw that conclusion, but I consider it warranted.

If the source of viable form change proposals is assumed to be random, its performance should parallel D. D. Axe’s ratio of viable to nonviable proteins from random synthesis, that is, it should approach a rate of 10⁷⁷ failures to every 1 success. Given this astronomically small rate of success, even large populations could not reach a viable form change within the known tenure of any species on the planet. Therefore, Ernst Mayr’s geographical isolation model for macroevolutionary change via punctuated equilibria requires (as does every other model we have seen so far) a nonrandom source for the new genetic information if it is to retain plausibility.

It is not clear if Mayr’s postulated cohesive factors have been empirically and experimentally confirmed, identified and described such that they are in fact known to loosen under the conditions of geographic isolation of small interbreeding populations. Pending further empiric studies that can demonstrate the existence of such cohesion factors and their “performance” characteristics in geographic isolation, Mayr’s view remains a plausible speculation that is both intuitive and very explanatory, but only given the proviso of a nonrandom source of the form change proposals that drive punctuated evolutionary jumps. Until his death in 2005, Mayr was acknowledged to be the senior living expert in the field of evolutionary theory. Axe’s protein synthesis data, being quite recent, was not available when Mayr’s cohesion factor hypothesis was invented. How Mayr would view the situation in light of the most recent data on transpositional elements and environmental cues affecting the developmental genome is not clear.[130] Ernst Mayr was not in the habit, as are some less conscientious evolutionists, of ignoring new evidence, but of admitting it and then doing his best to integrate it into the theory of evolution. He apparently did recently admit that the constancy of the morphological form of species through history was a problem for the Darwinian model.[131]

To get some idea of what Mayr means by a loosening of cohesion factors I offer the following quote from distinguished microbiologist John W. Drake’s (University of Illinois) seminal tome, The Molecular Basis of Mutation (1970), “the first extensive introduction to mutational mechanisms.”[132] Drake doesn’t explicitly identify Mayr’s “cohesion factor” concept in this discussion of “Localized Genetic Instabilities,” but, if memory serves, Mayr does reference him.

Localized Genetic Instabilities

Specific genes or sites sometimes suddenly become highly mutable, without a concomitantly increased mutability throughout the genome. A number of plausible molecular explanations for such instabilities may be imagined, but none have yet been established in any particular instance. Mutations which revert at extremely high rates could result from duplications which are reversed by recombinational events. Mutations could also occur which would not by themselves inactivate a gene, but which would nevertheless greatly increase its chance of mutation to an inactive form. Base pair substitutions, for instance, might assist in the creation of new hot spots, in which case most of the mutations which appeared later would be localized at a single site. Base pair substitutions could also partially inactivate a gene, not sufficiently to produce a phenotypic change in the organism under standard conditions, but sufficiently to render visible many further mutations within the cistron which might otherwise have gone undetected. In this case an entire gene might be unstabilized.[133]

Since the time of Mayr’s hypothesis we have learned that transpositional elements in the genome tend to have (yet to be explained) periodic bursts of intense activity. This is now hypothesized to account for much of the radical form change of evolution. If and how these bursts will be tied to geographical isolation triggered cohesive factors remains an open question.[134]

If, with C.R.C. Paul, we assume the fossil record is at least good enough to reveal the general patterns of evolutionary change, that is, if we take the current lessons the fossil record has to teach literally, we must acknowledge that the evolutionary process made even more frequent and larger jumps than neo-Darwinian theory has yet to admit, changing entire sets of features at the same time. All the evidence suggests that design proposals sophisticated enough to ground large jumps in life form evolution can arise consistently (and, I would say, at all) only from a highly nonrandom source having a strong bias towards functionally efficient designs, else the complex change could not be achieved in the time available, and the evolutionary path would be primarily a trail of horrific disabling mutations minus much of the constancy of the historical record.

Natural selection accounts for some of the appearance of bias for efficient complex design we see in evolution. But it only accounts for improved designs being retained, not for their being proposed, or for the uncanny efficiency of those proposals and the overall constancy in biological form through history. One may choose to hold off admitting intelligent design, as G. G. Simpson did, perhaps opting for an intermediate solution, for example, a nonrandom system like natural law that provides the strong bias toward biological design advancement. But the intelligent design complexity and probability data now compel us to admit at a minimum that the word “accidental” must be removed from the evolutionary process description. This is true because the bias for functional fitness (this is not environmental niche-based fitness, but rather mechanical soundness) is overwhelming in nature. Bias and accident, by definition, cannot coexist. Simpson conceded this in "The Problem of Purpose" chapter of This View of Life, saying it was unthinkable that the achievement of thousands upon thousands of viable progressive biological advancements at the rate we see in evolution could be accidental.

The Shanks and Joplin Challenge: “I feel so redundant!”

Some biologists, notably Niall Shanks and Karl H. Joplin, have claimed that observed redundancy in biological systems refutes Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis, asserting that redundant systems could in theory absorb the destructive impact of random mutation in one subsystem while another subsystem carries on its functions. This would allow the mutating cell to survive while evolution tinkers with it further.

In his reply to Shanks and Joplin in Philosophy of Science, Professor Behe dismisses these objections for several good reasons.[135] Many of the examples Shanks and Joplin give do not qualify as meeting the level and type of complexity Behe’s irreducibly complex systems exhibit. Indeed, some do not even involve living systems at all, but merely the catalytic cycles of raw chemicals. The processes cited are either too simple or the parts are not well-matched to each other, and thus are not representative of the systems of living organisms. The analogy Shanks and Joplin attempt to make is clearly broken.

But even to show that there are some examples of truly redundant systems in biology is not to show that accidental evolution could have occurred. To demonstrate the feasibility of accidental evolution one must demonstrate that all complex biological systems presently have or previously have had such redundancy in all critical components. There are many examples of complex living systems that do not appear to have true redundancy in all critical components (practically all of them). It only requires one complex system in one life form with irreducible complexity minus true redundancy to satisfy Darwin’s own criterion for the refutation of his theory, that is, finding a system or structure in biology that could not be formed by a series of small accidental variations.[136] Evolution has to build all of the known living systems, not just some of them. If accident can be shown incapable of building at least one of them, then there is evidence for purpose in nature.

But why does evolution need functional redundancy at all? If the theory of the late Professor Susumu Ohno and many others is correct, there is a significant amount of “junk DNA” in genomes that serves no useful purpose, and every gene has an inactive twin, an allele, that can perhaps be harmlessly modified. Alleles and junk DNA could function as blank “chalkboard space.” Evolution could work harmlessly in that space while the active genes take care of the cell’s daily genetic functions. Current estimates show “over half” of human DNA to be (suspected) “junk,” 5-10% for bacteria. Most other creatures range somewhere in between.

Chalkboard space sounds good on the surface, but there has not been enough time and physical resources in the history of evolution to complete the work by accident. One must also consider the inability of a random process to integrate new genes into a complex organism, even where they could be built. The only way junk DNA space would permit the building and implementation of advancement without destructively impinging upon actively coding or regulating regions of DNA is if an entire integrated subsystem were assembled and then launched as a complete working unit along with a variety of snippets that must be patched into just the right places in perhaps hundreds of locations around the genome to insure trouble-free integration of the change.

The hypothesis of accidental construction of subsystems in junk DNA or in the inactive allele (the presumed to be predominantly idle twin of an active gene) can be substantially ruled out for another reason. Evolution's working in inactive DNA space means that natural selection cannot quality control the process. Natural selection will not “see” the new developing subsystem until it is fully done and integrated into the active functions of the organism. Minus quality control, it is most unlikely that the thousands of genetic and cellular changes that have to be closely coordinated to make a functioning subsystem and integrate it could be achieved by accident. Natural selection is the only quality control an accidental process has, but even natural selection cannot explain how complex new designs can be accidentally proposed in the first place.

Recent developments in genome research may obviate the entire discussion of evolutionary development in the “junk” areas of the genome, however. As research continues, it is evident that significant portions of "junk" DNA working space are incrementally going away. The “junk” is turning out to have a purpose after all. In his Internet article on “Uncovering the Hidden Meanings of the Genome,” Dr. Paul Nelson discusses the work of John W. Bodnar, et al.., which reveals a hidden language resident in junk DNA.[137]

An amazing amount of the mystery of junk DNA has already given way to intensive genome research. Scientists like James A. Shapiro and Richard von Sternberg have adopted the working assumption that ‘junk DNA’ is not junk at all. “Indeed, we may come one day to regard erstwhile ‘junk DNA’ as an integral part of cellular control regimes that can truly be called ‘expert’.” This techno-prophecy has already been substantially realized in the brief three year period since Shapiro and von Sternberg's 2005 article with the discovery that the thought to be nonfunctional heterochromatin section of the genome contains essential genes and assists with several important genome functions.[138] Subtracting the heterochromatin section alone from the 50% of the human genome previously suspected to be junk, radically reduces the suspected junk portion to only 30%. With such a substantial change in the estimate occurring within a very few years suggests that the presumed to be junk portion of the genomes may soon be revealed to be effectively nil. A recent article in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution confirms this trend and suggests that we have been hasty in drawing conclusions about what is essential and what is not. [139]

Reduction in the “junk” portion of DNA increases the improbability of accidental evolution by increasing the complexity of the organism’s functional design in terms of its operational blueprint, the genome, and leaving less room to tinker without doing harm. However, even if a function is established for all ‘junk DNA’, the redundancy argument is not fully dead because some examples of true redundancy in biological systems remain. Shanks and Joplin point out that there are clear instances of cells and systems doing the same thing in more than one way.

Shapiro and von Sternberg also indicate that some of the repetitive DNA segments provide functional backup, though not all.[140] In other instances repetitive segments are required to work in concert with their duplicates to accomplish a specific task. One conclusion that may be drawn from recent research is that mere repetitiveness does not ensure redundancy. Nor has a functional backup for every critical DNA sequence been found. Finding two or more genetic locations offering some true redundancy does not equate to the possibility of risk-free random tinkering of any particular kind. One cannot replace just any gene with any randomly modified substitute with impunity, even in redundant areas, because single genes have been found to be managing more than one biological process. The gene may be redundant in having a backup for one of the processes it regulates or for one protein it codes, but may have no redundancy available for another critical process it governs. Random mutations to gene P53 in the mouse may allow embryonic development to continue more or less unaffected because another gene also directs developmental processes in the meantime (or most of them), but the mouse without P53 becomes susceptible to cancer. In other words, one of gene P53’s critical functions is redundant, but another is not.

Therefore, even where some redundancy exists, one cannot conclude that random tinkering is possible without showing the exact mechanisms and pathways that accidental tinkering will be using. But this is precisely what neo-Darwinists have never done: demonstrate the concrete and specific biomechanics of the accidental evolutionary event process at the genetic and intracellular level. Their theory has always been abstracted to a general conceptual level far removed from the biomechanics of form change with the focus remaining on the gross visible form characteristics of fossils, on the phenotype and the phylogenetic trees that portray presumed hereditary relationships. Where the research is biomechanically specific it does not reflect accidental processes, and where claims are made for accidental processes the research cited, if any, is not biomechanically specific. This is so totally frustrating for an objective researcher that one wants to scream “Where’s the beef!?” (or worse) If the evidence for accidental evolution were magically translated into fillet mignon and the human race had to survive on the equivalent, extinction due to starvation would follow within weeks. There is no beef to the argument for accidental evolution. Random mutation of genomes in the laboratory have produced nothing but horrible mutations and trivialities.

Early studies of repetitive DNA report much less than full genetic redundancy in organisms. Combined with the demonstratively destructive effects of random mutations in the lab this shifts the burden of proof to the neo-Darwinist to establish that individual organisms can survive random tinkering, and that the mutated gene line can escape a veto by natural selection long enough for subsequent accidental changes to convert an initial tragedy into an advancement. They have little hope of meeting that burden. The empirical evidence of multitudinous genetic studies demonstrates that random mutations create almost exclusively destructive effects irrespective of any redundancy that may be present. These studies show us that the type and magnitude of redundancy necessary to facilitate accidental evolution is simply not there.

Some thirty years ago, Eric Wieschaus and Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard did a classic large-scale mutagenesis experiment on the fruit fly aimed at saturating its genome for mutations affecting embryonic development.[141] The effects of a strong mutagenic chemical on millions of flies were observed. The study was successful enough to win them the Nobel Prize. The 95% plus credibility of the full saturation of this genome for developmental affectations is confirmed in Genetics, September 2004.[142] However, Dr. Paul Nelson reports that at an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in 1982 Eric Wieschaus reported noting no viable mutations among the results.[143]

Shapiro and von Sternberg report that the darling of the laboratory, the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, used in the Wieschaus/Nüsslein-Volhard study has from 33.7-57% repetitive DNA. That’s a lot of potential “redundancy”—yet still no viable results were seen from 95% saturation. These results are not surprising. Remember, random mutations are indiscriminate and imprecise. They are not intelligently guided to affect only one of two or more repetitive DNA segments. An exposure to toxics sufficient to affect one side of a duplicated segment may also mutate its backup.

It only takes one nucleotide change to alter a triplet that codes for an amino acid. As little as two random changes to the amino acid sequence of a protein can, and usually does, destroy its proper function.[144] The destruction of a biological function via accidental genetic mutation is thus a simpler achievement than the formation of cancer, which requires up to 20 genetic pathway exposure events,[145] and cancer is an enormously common event. An accidental evolutionary process, then, will always break a living machine before it advances it, or so nearly always that accidental evolution is deprived of its hypothesized engine for productive change in real time. The phenomenon of cancer is the “best” that we have seen an accident achieve—that and outright breakage of the machine or regression in function. Accidental mutations cannot produce beneficial change on a scale sufficient to match the historical evolutionary timeline, and probably not at all.

This, the fact that shotguns don't work to fix watches, is hardly surprising. But mutation studies suggest that there is in fact nowhere for the accidental evolutionary process to go, no small change options that will work as intermediate steps between different kinds of creatures, steps that natural selection might vote to preserve. This is corroborated in the observed phenomenon of punctuated equilibrium. The survivable steps necessary to move between different types of creatures are, at the end of the day, apparently quite large—too large for an accidental process to manage. As famous evolutionist Stephen J. Gould has written, the gradualist scenario of classic Darwinian theory is no longer defensible. Without gradualism, however, the accidental hypothesis is not defensible, if it ever was.

Exclusively nonviable or neutral results reported from mutagenesis studies, legs in place of antennae and wings that don’t work etc, suggest that even full redundancy may be insufficient to produce a beneficial result from random mutations. The fruit fly averages over 40% redundancy between the male and the female, but no viable results effecting major body form have been produced by random mutations. Darwinists make the invalid argument that because nonviable changes can result from random mutation, that progressive macroevolutionary advances can result as well. It doesn’t logically follow that they can. This is like a mechanic arguing his case at a job interview by saying that he knows the vehicle design so well that he can break it a thousand ways, while giving no evidence of his knowledge of how to repair it.

The results of mutagenesis studies belie the significance of the few examples of partially redundant biological systems cited in Shanks and Joplin’s article “Redundant Complexity: A Critical Analysis of Intelligent Design in Biochemistry.”[146] All the indications from the laboratory indicate that redundancy in biological systems is seldom true or full redundancy at all because random mutations are producing destructive results regardless of any redundancy that may be present.

Early Redundancy

Achieving sufficient genetic redundancy in the earliest life forms is an especially difficult problem for neo-Darwinian theory. Natural selection does not require redundancy to be initially built into a design. Only after nonredundant designs begin to fail in competition with redundant designs does natural selection favor redundancy. Redundant designs being more complex than nonredundant systems would typically not occur first in an accidental construction process; the simpler designs would be achieved first. Neo-Darwinian evolution, if it happened, must almost certainly have begun with nonredundant designs.

Therefore, random mutation driven evolution could not have quickly proceeded from the first life forms because those organisms did not have the redundancy needed to withstand accidental tinkering. To get to sufficiently redundant forms of early life, evolution would have to have completed a number of restarts until it finally hit upon the higher level of complexity needed in redundant design. This would consume a much longer amount of time, and the neo-Darwinists are already in the red.

The problem of accidental construction of redundant design is not a problem restricted to bacteria and early life forms alone, where it might appear to be relatively easy to achieve. It must again be overcome with each new evolutionary advancement in cell type or addition of a new biological form, structure or function. A single structure in advanced organisms like mammals is many times more complex than the entire system of a prokaryotic organism (bacteria, algae etc.). More complex designs tend to be more sensitive to tinkering, and therefore have a greater need for redundancy.

There are 120 different types of cells in vertebrates alone.[147] Achieving redundancy in 120 different cell types via random mutations requires that the vastly improbable event of achieving initial redundancy in a bacterium be repeated 120 times. Creating redundancy at each level of hierarchical bodily systems increases the improbability for the total task of achieving sufficient evolutionary redundancy even further. Finally, this improbable event must recur with each of the many thousands of alterations to the genomes that occur on the evolutionary tree as bacteria advance towards more complex forms of life, ultimately achieving a thousand fold increase in genome size.

Modern arguments of the Shanks and Joplin variety do not succeed in showing that accidental neo-Darwinian evolution could have occurred because they evidence too few examples of redundancy and cannot demonstrate that achievement of the needed redundancy is within reach of an accidental process in real time. Nor do they address the failure of existing redundancies to counteract the deleterious effects of random mutations in experimental studies.

“We have a winner!”

Having survived the Shanks/Joplin redundancy challenge, Professor Michael Behe's irreducible complexity thesis remains strong. A true counterexample to irreducible complexity must demonstrate (1) that critical nonredundant DNA segments are virtually nonexistent in biological systems; and (2) that the exclusively nonviable results of thousands of mutagenic studies are somehow invalidated. Professor Behe reminds us that as the evidence against neo-Darwinian evolution inexorably mounts we must at some point concede that the threshold of sufficiency has been crossed. [148]

The following table summarizes that mounting evidence in the form of factors affecting the probability of an accidental origin of all life forms. Certain steps are gross underestimates, such as steps 3 & 4, which have been simplified to make the process more tractable to the nontechnical reader.

Table 1: Improbability of neo-Darwinian Evolution

Factor Description	Symbol	One chance in
1. The improbability of getting life from a chemical soup	OL	10¹²⁸
2. Achieving minimal redundancy needed to proceed forward from the first simple organisms via random evolution	IR
3. Achieving redundancy in 120 different cell types	CTR	IR¹²⁰
4. The improbability of randomly generating enough useable proteins to create 100 million species (an underestimate)	PG	10⁷⁷ X 8.5 X 10³ More accurately this should be10⁷⁷ raised to the power of 85,000, an enormously greater magnitude. The next step toward realism raises the number even higher to account for all proteins in the tree, of life, not just the human body. This would raise the improbability to something greater than 10⁷⁷ raised to the power of 200,000.
5. Systems proteomics, the complexity of protein-protein interactions, appears far beyond what an accidental process could achieve (This will be an immense number as our best computers cannot model this process due to its complexity.)	SP
6. Accidentally creating one cellular machine: a ribosome	CM1	10⁷⁷
7. Accidentally creating a 2nd cellular machine: a cellulosome	CM2	6 X 10⁸⁰
8. Accidentally achieving the genetic mechanisms for DNA transcription, replication, and regulatory functions, including the alternative splicing process and transpositional mechanisms of the more complex organisms. The complexity of transcription (translation) alone must equal or exceed the genome being translated. The regulation of cell functions is another enormous increase in complexity. Some of this complexity may be subsumed under the protein/enzyme synthesis factor previously estimated at #4 but not all of it.	GN
9. Accidentally creating many thousands of cellular machines (10⁷⁷X 1,000)	CM	10⁸⁰ More accurately this should be 10⁷⁷ Raised to the 1,000 power, or 10⁷⁷⁰⁰⁰.
10. Reaccomplishing the jump from single celled to multicellular organisms multiple times, i.e., at the beginning of each phyla	MC	MC⁴⁰
11. The Cambrian Explosion of most animal forms in a brief 5-10 million year period radically reduces the time available for a random process to work.	CE
12. The total biological complexity of all of an organism’s hierarchical systems embedded nine levels deep taken together vastly increases the improbability that a random process could construct them. A single organism, the human body, has trillions of cells each with potentially thousands of parts (certain proteins are made on demand, that is, they are situation specific) doing millions of things per minute.	TBC
13. The complexity of the human immune system alone appears beyond the scope of an accidental construction process.	IS	10¹²
14. The complexity of the human brain and nervous system is beyond our current comprehension. (100,000,000,000 brain cells, each with thousands of connecting fibers)	NS	10¹⁶
15. The complexity of the DNA regulatory, damage recognition and repair systems	DR
16. The added improbability of accidentally developing several critically related complimentary traits at the same time	CD
17. Convergence. The independent achievement of the same design feature over and over again in separate evolutionary routes multiplies the workload and improbability of the accidental evolutionary process significantly.	CV
18. Mutation rates are insufficient to produce enough random variation to generate the taxonomic inventory within the geologic timeline established by the fossil record.	MR
19.The improbability of consistently achieving significant levels of symmetry in millions of designs (primarily in plants, though in some animal features) by accident.	SD
20. Fine art in nature. Neo-Darwinian theory cannot explain the origin of designs of this type, or explain how they can be preserved in a randomly mutating environment where natural selection has no concern for artistic aspects.	AF
21. Harmful effects of random genetic transfers impede evolutionary progress more than advance it. Accidents break living machines before advancing their design.	GT
22. The absence of a common ancestor, links between the phyla and many major variations create a requirement for many fast and extensive jumps in evolutionary progress (punctuated equilibrium) each of those jumps hugely improbable.	FR
23. Minimal dysfunctional designs in the fossil record show that few random attempts were made, if any, prior to hitting upon correct design. This is supremely improbable for a random process.	FA
24. Mass extinctions and ice ages cause the loss of significant evolutionary progress at least seven times in Earth’s history.	ME
25. Complexity and fragility of developmental processes precludes the possibility of accidental tinkering generating anything except tragic birth defects.	DC
26. The species barrier: extragenetic control mechanisms determine the species, not DNA. DNA and cell membrane microtubule control structures must then be evolved in close coordination. Achieving coincidental mutations between two different systems exponentially multiplies the improbability of achieving macroevolution by accident. The DNA and microtubule systems are not necessarily fully independent but the total volume of change is increased by the need to coordinate the two systems. Nor has the microtubule cell membrane structure been shown to be completely dependent in such a closely linked way that the corresponding changes in DNA and microtubules for evolutionary advancements can be assumed to be synchronized regardless of what an accidental process may do.	SB
27. Extragenetic factors such as methylated DNA and RNA mediated gene silencing systems add yet another level of complexity that must be coordinated and integrated by accident to achieve advancement in biological function (proper gene expression).[149]	EP
28. Genetic changes to areas of the genome governing somatic behavioral routines for such things as mating behavior must be synchronized with other genetic changes, thus further complicating the evolutionary process and reducing the chance of accidental success.	SOM
29. Limitations of entropic or accidental forces to achieving proportionately small magnitudes of ordered effects make it impossible for random mutations to generate complex life forms.	LEF
30. The library analogy: it is impossible to improve one masterpiece by accident, let alone millions in succession.	LA
31. The high complexity and closely matched parts of cellular systems forbids both accidental assembly and random tinkering (Professor Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis).	HC
32. The irreducible complexity/system integration problem. The close interaction of many parts of cellular and bodily systems with many others requires simultaneous implementation of corresponding changes to multiple parts, systems and genes—another exponential increase in the total improbability.	IC
33. The lack of a neo-Darwinian biomechanic for change, a biochemical pathway for the accidental evolution of life after so much dedicated investigation and so much biomechanical visibility adds to the improbability that there is an accidental pathway to be found. Read Granville Sewell’s paper “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution” in The Mathematical Intelligencer. Vol. 22, no. 4 (2000): 5-7 here.	BM
34. Frequent reversals of initial progress. Reversible processes create an almost impassible barrier to accidental evolution. Proteins dissolve again in the solution they are hypothesized to have been formed in. Biological machine design proposals are relentlessly pounded with harmful changes while the first few thousand genetic and cellular changes are being compiled. This makes the process of getting a new design proposal constructed up to the point where it can affect survival fitness—the earliest point at which natural selection can lock it into place—nearly impossible for an accidental process. DNA sequence change by accidental mutation does not reflect a strict reversal scenario, but rather a highly probable reversal. In this case accidental mutations are incessantly trying to fix something that isn’t broken, “reversing” any small amount of progress to an again meaningless or harmful string of nucleotides.	RIP
35. Universality of the DNA dictionary: the improbability that an accidental process would not have tried other DNA translation schemes beyond the minimal variations that have been seen in tightly circumscribed exceptions.	UDNA
36. Time management programs, biological clocks that synchronize independent events, order dependent sequences of critical multiple step processes, critical time windows for process completion, all add yet another layer of complexity and improbability that forbids construction of living machines via an accidental process.	TM
Total = One chance in approximately 10⁴⁷³ X IR X CTR (IR¹²⁰) X SP X GN X MC⁴⁰ X CE X TBC X DR X CD X CV X MR X SD X AF X GT X FR X FA X ME X DC X SB X EP X SOM X LEF X LA X HC X IC X BM X RIP X UDNA X TM

Is the Probability Argument Valid?

Defenders of neo-Darwinian evolution have strangely attempted to tell us that probability is irrelevant to scientific explanation in evolution, while it remains the very essence of explanation everywhere else in biology and in all the other branches of science. Some theorists have even claimed that standard probability theory need not be used to determine the correct values where evolutionary issues are concerned. But no scientist or engineer ignores standard probabilities when important issues hang in the balance. Since the advent of quantum mechanics, it has been indisputable that the very foundations of science, even the natural laws, are probabilistic![150] Absolutely all of science’s arguments have now taken the form of a probability argument!

In Scientific Laws, Principles, and Theories, Robert E. Krebs gives a candid and succinct statement of the probabilistic nature of science:

Historically, all effects or events were assumed to have a cause, or possibly several causes, or to be co-events. We now know that many natural events are described and predicted by statistical probabilities, not mathematical certainties. This is true of very large events in the universe, as well as the very small events as related to subatomic particles and energy. These very small events led to quantum theory and indeterminacy (uncertainty principle), resulting in some problems with the cause-and-effect concept for accepted physical laws.

Scientists do not think in terms of possible or could, or impossible or couldn’t, but rather in terms similar to likely or credible (probable), or unlikely or incredible (improbable). This of course, makes the use of statistical methods such as probability theory a powerful tool.[151]

John Gribbin informs us in Q is for Quantum: An Encyclopedia of Particle Physics, that quantum mechanics, especially, integrates probability theory into its understanding of all that occurs at the level of subatomic particles: “Alternatively, you can think of it as another manifestation of the probabilistic nature of the quantum world—where everything is governed by the rules of probability, nothing is certain.”[152] A more “down to earth” case in point is the meteor threat. We are reasonably comfortable that a 1 in 6000 chance of a catastrophic meteor strike in the next century will not happen.[153] For evolution we propose that a possibility less than one chance in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000...continued to well over 470 zeros, comprises our best explanation for the origin of life? How is this logically consistent?

NASA wouldn’t spend valuable research dollars on a mission with such an abysmal chance of success. Why then do we require our entire scientific research community and educational system to be tethered to this absurdly improbable assumption of accident as the basis of life’s origin? Anywhere else in science, when the improbability of a theory or hypothesis becomes so great, scientists reject it out of hand. In footnote 17 to chapter 3 of The Fifth Miracle theoretical physicist and noted science author Paul Davies confirms this:

An explanation that relies on freaky circumstances, although not impossible, is inherently implausible. We may take the odds against those circumstances as a quantitative measure of our disbelief, or lack of confidence, in the fluke theory.

Robert Shapiro reports in a recent article in Scientific American that Nobel Laureate Christian de Duve has called for a rejection of immense improbabilities as essentially equivalent to the miraculous and therefore outside of science.[154] Shapiro, himself, goes on, in arguing for a metabolism first as opposed to RNA first origin of life, to use the probability form of argument to support his own thesis, arguing that the improbability of RNA being accidentally formed in the prebiotic environment of Earth suggests a metabolism first origin of life.

Evolutionary scientists have been inconsistent with normal scientific method and standards in another way. When encountering the highly improbable, scientists additionally ask for a concrete and detailed explanation of the mechanics of the process in order to establish that such an implausible thing is even possible. The next step requisite to even marginally legitimizing a fluke theory is to seek a causal explanation of what brought such an unlikely sequence of events into being in the first place. In the case of accidental evolution, neo-Darwinian theorists have failed on both counts.

Darwinists do not provide a process description that links minor changes into major body form innovations. Nor do they give a causal explanation that can account for the highly improbable origin of complex biological information from accidental processes. In short, we are missing the biomechanics of the process of evolution, and every time we look at the genetic and molecular structures and processes in order to discover those biomechanics we find a new seemingly insurmountable obstacle to an accidental process having originated life or generated major biological form change.

The science of weather is built around probability. Gamblers depend upon it to make decisions. Who would bet real money on a roulette wheel with 10⁴⁷⁰ number/color options? Birth control methods are based upon probabilities. Probability is key to winning sports strategies. Even rules of engagement in life and death confrontations of armed combat are derived from probabilities. Physicists at least understand that all of science is a probabilistic endeavor, and that probability theory is a valid enterprise. Noted evolutionists, such as Mark Ridley, use similar estimates of genetic probabilities in their own logic, and one of the primary tools the neo-Darwinists use to construct the hypothetical tree of life, maximum likelihood, is a straightforward application of statistical probability theory.[155]

G. G. Simpson, one of the fathers of the new evolutionary synthesis of the 1950s, in acknowledging that a chance process could not achieve such adaptations as have been seen in the history of evolution without exhausting all the resources of the universe first, implicitly admitted not only the validity of the probability form of argument, but that it is sufficient to unequivocally establish purpose (of an unspecified kind) in evolution. Here too is the forerunner of William Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument: the probability bound, the discussion of which follows in some detail in Appendix 2. Simpson did not call the purpose he saw in nature “cosmic purpose,” or “divine purpose,” or even “intelligent design,” he merely called it “purpose,” and dismissed true accident as an impossibility. He believed that science could go no further in its conclusions than to rule out accident. Simpson believed that, by accomplishing a series of probability reducing steps one step at a time, the evolutionary process could achieve what is admittedly astronomically improbable taken as a whole.

Historian of science John H. Wilson in a sense steals a page from Simpson's book in his attack on the probability argument. In his article, "The Origin of Life," Wilson asserts that creationists were not calculating the probability based upon the actual chain of events that evolutionists had proposed, rather they were erroneously assuming that the proteins/enzymes needed for life were synthesized prebiotically. However, Dr. Doug Axe has recently shown (2004) in a peer-reviewed study that the improbability of random synthesis of a biologically useful enzyme within a living organism is still well beyond the realm of scientific credibility for an accidental process at 10^-77.[156]

In the final analysis, the improbabilities established for neo-Darwinian evolution by modern scientific studies come from a scientifically rigorous description of the physical processes involved in the structure of life: peer-reviewed studies and uncontested facts of biology. They describe the true nature of the “deck” used in dealing out the historical evolutionary process, revealing just how radically nonstandard that deck is. Therefore, the probability argument of Stephen Meyer, William Dembski and the intelligent design team is valid.

Stacking the Deck

Scientists such as W. Ford Doolittle have offered criticisms of some of the early forms of the probability argument:

To switch gaming metaphors, wonder in the face of the improbability of a horse is like bemusement over receiving any particular hand in a game of bridge. Since there are 4 X 10²¹ possible hands, any single hand is incredibly unlikely, and one would be foolish to anticipate receiving it—but no hand is any more unlikely than any other…[157]

But, or course, this is a bad analogy as regards the origins and development of life. Certainly broken, incomplete or otherwise flawed machines are much more likely to be dealt out of an accidental process than elegant, sophisticated, and efficiently functional mechanisms. We may not be justified in wondering at getting a horse as opposed to an elephant; be we are justified in wonder at getting something alive versus dead, or getting a sophisticated mechanism versus a simple one.

To be plausible even on the surface Doolittle’s argument must assume a standard deck where all cards occur with equal frequency. Nothing could be further from the truth in biology. The odds against getting a single protein by accident is at least 10⁷⁷ to one. A human body employs approximately 85,000 different proteins. The improbability of achieving those in sequence by accident is 10^-77 times itself 85,000 times! (10^-6545000) Even if there were an infinite number of possible survivable species designs, not just the 100,000,000 species we currently estimate, and we didn’t care which one was produced, the probability of getting any one of those options, if they were to have 85,000 biologically viable proteins in their structure, would still be 10^-6545000 in this world. To offer such an astronomic improbability as our best explanation is not only not good science, it is so far from the standard as to not be science at all but blind faith in the accidental/atheistic worldview.

It is very important to realize that nature does not have a standard deck of playing cards. Natural law and the highly informed state of matter and energy at the Big Bang entail that all possible “denominations” of cards do not occur with equal frequency within the “deck” of the physical universe. DNA sequences that do anything useful for life have been found to be vanishingly rare among all the possibilities in comparison with those that are deleterious or neutral. According to Dr. Stephen Meyer, who cites peer-reviewed protein synthesis studies, we can expect only one useful sequence of 100 amino acid residues (a standard size protein) per every 10⁷⁷ useless ones to be randomly generated from within a living organism. That ratio rises to 10¹²⁵ to 1 when the process takes place outside a living organism.

Clearly, if you play blackjack with a multi-trillion-card deck having 4 of every denomination out of every 52 cards except the ace, of which there is only one in the entire deck, not every hand is going to be as probable as any other. In the game of life on Earth, a biologically viable protein is that ace. The deck of life is nonstandard. In nonstandard decks uniform gaming theory expectations no longer apply. One has to adjust those expectations in accordance with the known content of the deck. This is the first and most elementary principle of probability theory: describe the system accurately first, then compute the probability afterward. Nonetheless Doolittle invites us to make the mistake of failing to first accurately describe the deck of cards being used before calculating probabilities for the optional hands that might be dealt out.

It is important to realize just how astronomically rare the hand of life is known to be. Mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose estimates the rarity or specificity of the exact configuration of our life-compossible universe as 10 raised to the power of 10¹²³. That is 1 followed by ten thousand trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion zeroes. One good sized book (400 pages) can only hold a million of those zeroes.

What Doolittle fails to acknowledge is that gaming theory only seems to apply to DNA if one makes the mistaken assumption that all possible DNA sequences are as functional for life as all others. As Dr. Meyer has shown, the immense rarity of functionally viable segments of DNA of sufficient length to make even a single protein means the accidental appearance of such a sequence in a reproductive or developmental cell is the equivalent of winning many thousands of lotteries in sequence. Accidental results destructive to life, on the other hand, are quite common. Therefore, Doolittle’s analogy between the game of bridge and the origin and development of life does not hold, and his argument fails.

Finally, as Andy Rooney might say, there is another thing I don’t like about all of this. Criticisms of the probability argument have been far too casual. Richard Dawkins claims to have explained the whole problem away by starting his explanation, in Climbing Mount Improbable, in the middle of the process after life forms and genomes have already been built. He focuses on merely moving genes around “randomly.” In light of the structured system of transpositional elements that have since been discovered genome evolution should not be considered random at all, and may even be substantially directed by the aggregate of natural laws and the self-organizational tendencies those laws produce. None of the biomechanics of protein and gene creation from scratch are addressed whatsoever in Mount Improbable, and these are the areas, with the gene translation system, in which the largest increments of improbability are generated. More accurately stated, Dawkins has not climbed Mount Improbable, he has ignored it, and explained an ant hill.[158]

The whole thing is easy as pie to Dawkins. Random mutations are culled or preserved by natural selection. The accidental form changes that work are preserved and the tree of life is built up one step at a time in this fashion. But this is merely a process in the imagination of the theorist, it has not one thing to do with the concrete demonstrable facts of biological mechanisms. Dawkins theory has not advanced from the time Darwin issued it in 1859. It is a protoplasm era theory and invokes the same type of magical concepts: the changes come out of nowhere and natural selection does all the rest although we can’t show that it had the requisite form change proposals to act upon within the required time frame. There is no evidence that such a process ever occurred and yet it is shamelessly called an established fact and an icon of science on the level of gravity or relativity theory.

Neo-Darwinists suggest we shouldn’t put credence in well-supported probability estimates, when we are known to do exactly that everywhere else in science, industry and life. At times they go so far as to imply that there is no standard and reliable way to compute probabilities, and that anyone’s view of probability is as good as anyone else’s. What nonsense! The computational rules of probability theory are fully well defined and established. For those unfamiliar with such things, the computational rules for probabilities are laid out clearly in most math textbooks and many reference books, including the fifth edition of James' Mathematics Dictionary and Armstrong's Elements of Mathematics. The rules for standard calculation of probabilities have been know since they were originated by the French mathematician Blaise Pascal in the seventeenth century![159]

Monkey Business

But what about the monkey typists theorem? Don’t monkeys somehow have the ability to type themselves out of a probability bind (writers certainly do not)? Certain Darwinists are famous for trying to convince people that accidental evolution is possible by quoting a claim attributed (possibly falsely) to Thomas Huxley that reflects mathematician Emile Borel’s mathematical “proof” that chimpanzees typing random keystrokes at a normal rate would ultimately (not necessarily in the lifetime of the Earth or even the universe, however) produce Shakespeare’s Hamlet.[160] Neo-Darwinists are so supremely confidant when they talk about the power of a monkey at a typewriter that one feels that intelligent design writers should simply stop arguing in mid sentence and immediately fall in with the unemployment line. According to the neo-Darwinists, evolution is so simple monkeys could do it!

Borel’s demonstration is, in fact, valid given the artificial rules and assumptions he sets for his proof. Those rules and assumptions are, however, not compatible with the realities of the physical world. Borel says that given infinite time, monkeys typing randomly would eventually recreate Shakespeare’s Hamlet and in fact all of the great works of history. Should such an imaginary example about monkeys typing under purely theoretical conditions give us good reason to deny the concrete results of mutagenesis studies, birth defects and the inability to reproduce neo-Darwinian claims in the laboratories of our own non-theoretical world? Hardly. The monkey example may be endearing, but it is not scientifically valid as applied to biology; it only pertains to pure number theory where the definition of entropy operative in our thermodynamic laws is explicitly assumed not to hold. Existing solely in the realm of pure mathematics, the monkey typist theorem is fully removed from physical reality. The two systems, the one argued from (pure mathematics) and the one argued to (the real physical world) must be analogous for the proof to hold for the purposes of biological processes in the real world. The two assumptions Borel makes, infinite time and fully random or chaotic motion of elementary particles, motion absent any bias towards order whatsoever, have not held so far in the history our physical world. Therefore the analogy does not hold and Borel’s proof is invalidated as it applies to evolution. Our universe is not only demonstrably, but dramatically not a fully random system, and it clearly, according to Big Bang theory, has not been around for infinite time.

The strongest refutation of the monkey typist argument is inherent in thermodynamic law. If the monkeys are typing in our world, the real one, then the natural law of this world applies. The definition of entropy in thermodynamic law states that entropic energy can never assume a significantly ordered state again; it is completely and permanently useless. Complete randomness in the physical world is 100% entropy. Therefore, no ordered result can ever accrue in such a world in any amount of time. There would be no monkeys and there would be no Hamlet.

So, you say, let’s fudge a little. Why be such a stickler for detail. Let’s say the world isn’t fully random, just substantially so. Let’s say with many of the popular commentators of today that the world exists on “the edge of chaos.” OK, let’s say it. It won’t meet the requirements of Borel’s theorem, however, the monkey typists have been refuted, but for the sake of argument let’s make that assumption: the world is not fully random, only partially random. But if the world is not fully random, that means that there is at least a partial bias that prejudices the outcome in certain directions. Such a world cannot be used to argue against God or an intelligent designer because even a partial bias can ensure a specific result over time.

It is like pushing your son or daughter’s toy boat away from shore into a quiet stream. The direction of the push, perpendicular to the stream, is not where the child wants the boat to go, which is directly downstream to a toy dock that has been constructed on the bank. The father knows, of course, that soon after the boat enters the mild and invisible but unrelenting current it will make a turn and be carried along inline with the force of the natural flow of the stream. The boat, regardless of which direction it initially enters the water, will end up downstream. Is it an accident that the boat arrives at the dock just because it wasn’t micromanaged every inch of the way? No. Known conditions were sufficient to prejudice the outcome given sufficient time. It was therefore an act of intelligent choice and purpose, not random, and the events were substantially guided or constrained to produce the chosen outcome. Intelligent design theory says that we can detect concrete signs that there is such a current in nature and the cosmos, a current not yet fully described by science but unmistakably revealed in the results. Many of the physical constants that comprise this directional current toward life have been described, however, and probability theory strongly confirms the bias in the highly improbable outcome we have seen in the rapid achievement of complex life forms on Earth.[161]

There are other serious objections to the monkey typist theorem. The standard mutation rate at one change per billion nucleotides per year is not the speed of typing. One nucleotide change every thousand years for a bacterium hardly equates to a monkey or human banging away at full speed, even blindly. A large book only has a million characters in it; the human genome has three billion, and there are a few genomes larger. One can of course imagine with the neo-Darwinists that, if there were a way to constructively add up all the mutations from an entire population into a single creature every now and then, the math problem would be solved. But as we discussed in the section above on Lateral Transfers and the Acquisition of Genomes, if the consolidation process requires random, that is, accidental, transfers to achieve the consolidation, no time is gained and potentially greater damage is done than if single nucleotide changes had been used.

How long would it take for a random system to cough up the solar systems, our Earth, and its life forms? Assuming with Borel complete randomness (and, for the moment ignoring entropy), there are 10⁸⁰ particles more or less assumed to be in our universe. The number of combinations of particles are then 10⁸⁰ raised to the power of 10⁸⁰, which is the probability for any one specific optional form for the universe to take. There is presumably a range of these options that would still allow a world something like our own to be formed, but the odds against it are not substantially reduced for the purpose of our argument. The minimum time for a particle movement is 10^45th fraction of one second. How many billions of years would it take to achieve a 51% probability of achieving the form of our world after moving things around randomly each 10^45th of a second? Yes, I’m going to say it…you figure it out!

Trust me, it’s a long time. It is far longer than the age of our universe at roughly 20 billion years, suffice it to say trillions upon trillions upon trillions of years. But even then, merely coughing up the design of our world for an instant flash in the pan is not enough; the design must be consistently held through epochs of time. Holding that same form for only the smallest fraction of a second (10^45th) requires the initial improbability to be multiplied by itself. Thus with each passing fraction of a second the difficulty of the task increases exponentially. The amount of time required for an accidental event process to warrant the expectation of a consistent and stable world of natural law similar to our own within the bounds of a probability threshold endorsable by science is then incomprehensible.

An additional problem one would encounter in strictly applying the monkey theorem to the real world is that an ongoing purely random process will repeatedly access the polished form of the manuscript after it is final; the book will nearly always be quickly ruined and degenerated into gibberish. In a truly random (Borelian) world (as opposed to the one we actually have), the Shakespearean masterpiece would exist only for an instant before another monkey grabs it from the author’s hand, reinserts it into the typewriter and changes it to, at best, one of the perennial favorites of the men’s room, such as “Here I sit…’[162] Neither natural selection nor anything else can function to preserve and continue the best designs in a truly accidental world because the designs themselves fluctuate chaotically. They are, as it were, in a state of constant re-proposal.

Many modern scientists say I am beating a dead horse here, that they have admitted the world to be nonaccidental for decades. But every time objective scientists and theologians turn their back that horse mysteriously rises and gallops through the countryside proclaiming the virtues of an accidental worldview and the indisputable fact of neo-Darwinian evolution. A significant faction of scientists, specifically neo-Darwinian evolutionary theorists, have not abandoned the accidental worldview at all; they are simply loathe to try to defend it against modern data, despite the fact that a fully accidental world is incompatible with the very existence of natural law and therefore precludes science itself. Fully accidental worldviews also contradict what cosmology has discovered so far of the initial highly ordered state of the universe at the Big Bang, as well as contradicting the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics. The 2^nd Law says that entropy tends to increase. A fully accidental world begins with 100% entropy and therefore no tendency toward increased entropy can be grounded in such a system. Less than fully accidental worlds, of course, are still amenable to the purposes of an intelligent designer and cannot be used to support the atheist/materialist argument. Thus the Paul Reveres of accidental evolution only ride at night amongst those who haven’t done their homework regarding the true relationship of God and science. One of “Paul’s” more recent excursions follows in the quote from the NCSE Web site.

The bottom line for this part of our discussion is that the probability argument of intelligent design theory is not refuted by Borel’s theorem because the requisite conditions required for Borel’s theorem do not apply to the physical world. Nonetheless, the public minded citizens at the National Center for Science Education remain certain that Borel’s monkey theorem refutes intelligent design definitively and proves that all of us who support ID are blithering idiots who can do neither math nor science. Here the author begins with the scientifically unsupportable assumption of an infinite universe and infinite time contrary to Big Bang theory, ignoring the fact that all the alternatives we have to Big Bang theory (including multiverse[163] and an infinite universe) are not testable and therefore not scientific. He goes on to say that those who challenge the monkey theorem are not interested in good science. (The author here mistakenly lumps intelligent design theory in with Creation Science, a common and all too convenient error among Darwinian evolutionists.)

Thus creationist probability arguments can often be undermined by pointing out that any event with a probability greater than 0, no matter how low, will be likely to happen, if given enough opportunity, and sure to happen if opportunity is unlimited.

This principle is sometimes illustrated with the following thought experiment (of which the reader has probably heard one version or another): Suppose that a monkey, trained to hit the keys of a typewriter one by one in a truly random fashion, types forever, producing infinitely many pages of texts. No one doubts that the monkey would type page after page of gibberish, but it follows from the above principle that sooner or later the monkey would type all of the works of Shakespeare from beginning to end, without error, solely by accident…

The opponents of evolution are not interested in good science, and as I have attempted to show in this article, neither are they interested in good mathematics. Hence their arguments are not based on a complete and contemporary understanding of the scientific and mathematical principles that are relevant to the issue. This is yet another reason why creationist material has no business being taught in science classes - it threatens our students' education not only with bad science, but also bad mathematics.[164]

How can hearing both sides of the issue ever be a threat to science students in a democratic society? Errors in math, logic or empiric data can occur at anytime on either side of a scientific debate, regardless of which position is ultimately proven correct. The neo-Darwinist side is not immune to such errors of logic, as I demonstrate in the first appendix where 101 glaring logical fallacies in the Darwinist argument are revealed. Should neo-Darwinian evolution be banned from the schools because they have made serious mistakes in trying to defend it as the NCSE suggests for ID theory, which they mistakenly confuse with Creation Science? What nonsense! Banning a coherent theory from discussion, whether it is ultimately mistaken or not, is not a method of science but of totalitarian dictatorship. If lack of evidence were cause for censorship, accidental evolution should never have been discussed at all!

Information control and propaganda have no place in the classrooms of a free democratic nation. Our students deserve to hear both sides of this debate. It is not ID theorists who ask us to throw out the rules of science, but the NCSE, who has done so by offering the monkey theorem as support for neo-Darwinian evolution when the theorem can clearly never apply to a world governed by natural law and scientific principles at all, but only to an imaginary theoretical world of random chaos, a world where science itself is impossible, a dead world. We have seen enough of the philosophy of death in the rest of society; we need not endorse its teaching in the science classroom.

The real questions of evolutionary science, of course, are tied not to what is possible in infinite time with no rules of natural law, but to what is likely in the limited time available in Earth’s history, given our natural laws and the constraining influence of events that have come before in our history. One of those laws has to do with the solubility of proteins in water. Russell Grigg explains in an excellent article published online at Answers in Genesis, “Could monkeys type the 23rd Psalm?,” that the requisite proteins for the first life forms could not be randomly assembled without divine (ID theorists would substitute “intelligent design” for “divine,” while not ruling out the divine) assistance because the amino acids would be breaking down as fast as they formed in water in a reversible reaction. The water contained in the solution in which they were first formed would dissolve them again.[165]

To be realistic, the monkey typist analogy would have to acknowledge that the manuscripts the monkeys type corresponding to the random synthesis of proteins would be written in invisible ink, or afflicted with an incessant malfunction of the typewriter where the automatic correction tape removes letters previously typed before the remaining paragraphs were meaningfully composed and the composition saved by removing the page from the typewriter. Moments after a viable passage was achieved it would disappear. Borel’s theoretical monkeys don’t have to deal with such physical realities, all of their creation is presumed unaltered after the key hits the paper. A fully accidental world would pose more difficult obstacles yet, with every completed page eternally susceptible to substantial corruption after the fact of creation. The NCSE, of course, says the solution is simple, assume an infinite universe. There are two problems with this approach. One, that is a philosophical solution, not a scientific one, for science cannot support the infinite universe theory as preferable to the Big Bang finite theory. Two, even as a philosophical solution that might be true, it is far less probable than the alternative based upon the only kind of evidence we can give for or against it, which is scientific evidence. Probability is as relevant to the ultimate questions as to any other question in science.

In scientific prediction, test and theory evaluation, given both natural law and the description of prior events, probabilistic inferences are made possible as to which alternative outcome is most likely, often to the point of near certainty. Professor James W. Valentine reveals in chapter 3 of On the Origin of Phyla that it would, on average, take a monkey 10¹⁸⁰ years just to type the first sentence of Darwin's Origin of Species. This is a trillion, trillion, trillion (15 repetitions) years and the Earth has only existed 5 billion years.

All the monkeys should be allowed to do under a strict application of the truths of biology to Borel's theorem is to shift sets of several fully edited pages at random until they line up to make the final text. Darwinian theory itself has always admitted that it starts its explanation in the middle of the process. Darwinian evolution has no explanation of how the original sets of 2-10 meaningful pages come into existence in the first place, that is, they have no explanation of how genes and the genetic machinery are first originated. The only part of demonstrated viable biological form variation we truly know to have any random elements is in the reproductive mixing of a parents genes in the diploid reproductive process described by Mendelian genetics. But all of the hard parts of evolution are done before this takes place and the observed results never move the offspring outside the boundaries of its parent’s species.

The monkey typist example is fully disconnected from the facts of biology, physics, and cosmology. It can in no way be defended as representative of the actual biomechanics of evolution.

Doesn’t Natural Selection Make Accidental Evolution Possible?

In a recent Internet interview with ActionBioscience magazine Professor Douglas Futuyma says this:

The reason that natural selection is important is that it’s the central idea, stemming from Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, that explains design in nature. It is the one process that is responsible for the evolution of adaptations of organisms to their environment. Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection caused quite a stir when it appeared in 1859. Evidence to support evolution and natural selection, of course, has accumulated over time, and now science accepts that evolution is a fact and that natural selection explains very well how adaptive evolution takes place.[166]

While respecting Professor Futuyma’s expertise, I must disagree on this, one of the most basic questions of the evolutionary debate, because there is an inescapable logical difficulty that modern biochemistry has brought to light: highly complex sets of genetic sequences and extragenetic changes must occur before natural selection votes. There is no quality control mechanism for the extensive early design work that must be done before an advantageous evolutionary adaptation is achieved. Natural selection can only favor design changes after they are complete; it cannot help to build them. If natural selection cannot explain how complex design changes are built but only that the survivable survive, is it true that it “explains very well how adaptive evolution takes place”?

The Cambrian explosion poses a genuine challenge to those who, like Futuyma, casually assume the power and prevalence of natural selection as the driving force of evolution. It has prompted the late and distinguished Professor Susumu Ohno to pose the theory of a master genome with the genes needed for the new body plans being in place before the bulk of evolutionary advancements took place. Famous living evolutionist James W. Valentine describes the event in much the same way in his contribution to Tempo and Mode in Evolution: "The explosion required a repatterning of gene expression that mediated the development of novel body plans but evidently did not require an important, abrupt increase in genomic or morphologic complexity."

Ohno's theory and Valentine's interpretation of the evidence both indicate that the genes were in place in reasonably final form before the novel body plans began appearing in the early Cambrian. But this would mean that the bulk of the animal body plans were developed without natural selection ever having had a hand in the process. So what has natural selection actually contributed to the process of evolution?

Many of the functions and structures of the Cambrian animals had never before appeared on the world stage, their phenotypes were previously unknown to nature. They were not selected as most competitive over a mass of failed design proposals as the classic accidental form of evolutionary theory requires. In one “moment” they were not, and in the next they simply were. Neo-Darwinian theory gives us no explanation of how the fully formed genes for a myriad of novel forms, apparently latent in Precambrian fauna, got there, how they became so quickly activated without perceivable error, and generally how so much efficient and elegant development of the genomes could be accomplished sans the help of the previously thought to be essential driving force of evolution, natural selection.

The exact same mystery is seen at the base of the tree of life where evolution had to do this seemingly impossible task, pull together from simple raw chemicals the constituents of a vastly complex biological information system and precisely configure a half million RNA/DNA nucleotides into the minimum gene set that could support a simple organism. Simple organisms do not require only one gene (~1,000 nucleotides), or two or three, but from 300 to 500 genes, and probably several times that. Humans have at least 25,000 genes. This feat of originating new complex information had to be reaccomplished many times throughout the tree of life as new genes were needed that could not be generated by minor modifications to existing ones.

In Darwin’s day before we could see inside the cell, natural selection offered an appealing explanation of design adaptation. It was never observed to be operating on the grand scale Darwinian theory asserted, however, and there has been some 150 years of rapid scientific advancement since. Darwinian evolution is an old theory, so old in fact that it has fallen fully out of touch with the realities of modern research. It is so far removed from the detailed biomechanics of organismal change that it has lost its force of explanation.

Natural selection undoubtedly occurs to some extent—survival of the fittest is unavoidable—but it can neither redeem the failings of an accidental process nor explain the Cambrian explosion. The presence of natural selection is not incompatible with intelligent design, of course. The concept of natural selection as one potential tool a designer might use is neither new nor implausible. Michael Ruse tells us in the seventh chapter of his well-crafted and historically rich treatise, The Darwinian Revolution, that both Darwin and Wallace, the co-originators of the theory of evolution (both amateurs by the way), separately allowed for this possibility. Darwin posed this alternative in the form of the God as farmer analogy, with God selecting what to harvest and replant (throwing the rest away), while Wallace viewed natural selection as representing a self-regulating machine.

Everyone Wins at Strickberger’s Lottery!

Futuyma, Ridley, and Strickberger give no examples of natural selection acting at the genetic and cellular level of the biochemical construction process where biological changes must first occur, and it is generally agreed among scientists that natural selection does not act there. Ernst Mayr, himself, says "Selection does not deal with single genes because the target is the phenotype of the entire individual." If natural selection does not act at the level of the gene, which is the most significant single component of a subsystem that impacts the phenotype, how much less does selection act on the smaller DNA segments and cellular subsystem components which, though critical to the construction of advantageous design change, do not affect functionality until most of them have long since been built. It is only at this latter point of functional change, when a new subsystem has been integrated and “put into the field,” that the survival fitness of the organism is altered and natural selection comes to cast a vote.

Although deterministic theorists like Dr. Sidney Fox use terms like “molecular selection,” they are not claiming that the traditional concept of natural selection in the sense of survival of the fittest applies at the molecular level. Rather, they are describing a bias in natural law that favors molecules conducive to life in preference to "inert" molecules. A bias for life in biochemistry, of course, is exactly what intelligent design theory predicts, and is incompatible with an accidental worldview.

Nonetheless we find Dr. Monroe Strickberger, a noted evolutionary scientist and textbook author, claiming that figure 4-2 of the first edition of his textbook, Evolution, and accompanying explanation of natural selection completely allays any concerns one might have about accidental processes—this without mentioning a single biochemical fact! Strickberger’s explanation is 100% abstract (unconnected to the facts of microbiology at the level where the change must actually take place) as was Charles Darwin’s in the 1860’s. It incorporates none of the scientific advancements made since Darwin’s time. It is as fully unconnected to the biochemical systems of real organisms as Borel’s monkey typist theorem to which it has a close logical affinity.

There are two flaws in Strickberger’s example that negate its value. First he stacks the deck by portraying a bowl full of workable adaptive combinations. Of course, if 90% of everything chance has to choose from works well for the organism’s advancement, evolution would be achieved in short order! Strickberger is throwing us a curve ball here in that he can justify presenting a bowl full of workable adaptations on the basis of the actual historical process of evolution. It was achieved in short order. But what he is arguing for and ostensibly describing with this example is the accidental model, not the historical event. By confusing the two he has presented the nonrandom historical record of evolution as evidence of what an accidental process can do. This is the logical fallacy of equivocation writ very large indeed, and is therefore fully unacceptable. It is also a question begging enterprise, for Strickberger must first assume the evolutionary process to be accidental (without proof) in order to portray the bowl full of adaptations as proof of what an accidental process can do. This is fully circular logic and of no evidentiary value whatsoever.

Dr. Stephen Meyer, on the other hand, has informed us that, working upon the assumption of randomness that neo-Darwinists claim, the number of viable adaptive options present in the bowl would be exactly the opposite of Strickberger's assumption, with astronomically few opportunities for accident to find new DNA sequences useful to evolution. Here Strickberger is caught “rigging the game” as was Doolittle in his broken analogy to the game of bridge. To make Strickberger's assumption of a bowl full of workable adaptive options we would be in contradiction of the neo-Darwinist assumption that biological adaptations are not biased towards what is advantageous for the organisms, and that natural selection only later preserves those very few options that are advantageous. In neo-Darwinian theory, natural selection is the magician that pulls the rabbit only occasionally out of the predominantly empty hat. In the neo-Darwinian model there are not supposed to be several dozen fuzzy tails, twitching noses, and rotating ears overflowing the brim of the hat before the “Abra cadabra!” of natural selection. The magician of natural selection is supposed to have to scratch around in the evolutionary “hat” of mainly destructive or neutral change proposals for quite a long time, turn the hat over and tap the bottom, frown and grunt, then finally some new small adaptation that works for survival fitness is found.

Neo-Darwinists feel they have satisfactorily countered this objection by saying with G. G. Simpson that although adaptations are not initially biased for fitness, they become, by virtue of a sequence of steps occurring over time, more and more conducive to beneficial mutations being found. The process in many cases is irreversible and therefore nonviable options are increasingly locked out of contention. Progressive evolution then becomes less and less improbable as the process advances over time. But this only removes the bias to a higher or second level in the process. The historical fossil record shows the rate of evolution to be at first quite slow, then astronomically rapid during the Cambrian period, and then quite slow again. Clearly, evolution has acted as if the "bowl" was in fact full of viable adaptive combinations because it has made so much progress in such a short time during the Cambrian, giving precious little evidence of failed attempts along the way. But to say that nature has a bias towards incrementally creating a larger and larger bias for life as it goes is still to say that the process is biased for life, and therefore not accidental.

There is a logical fallacy implicit in the denial that a machine-building machine, for example an automated robotic factory, must be at least as complex as the machines it produces. This fallacy is invoked by neo-Darwinists when they say that because nature can build the machines of life in steps over time there is no justification for intelligent design. A machine-building machine is always more complex than the machines it builds. Therefore the scenario they propose does not reduce but rather increase the suggestion of intelligent design.

The achievement of the first simple life forms would seem to be the prototypical example of the “Strickbergerian” claim that the steps along the way increasingly facilitate the achievement of progressive life form evolution. This is so because the odds of achieving a new viable protein within an organism are some forty orders of magnitude better than achieving a viable protein outside an organism from inert chemicals. Certainly this is a step toward increasing the potency of the evolutionary process. But an increase in the bias for life by forty-eight orders of magnitude, by definition, makes the system nonrandom. Is the bowl of evolution very much like Strickberger describes? Yes. Does that bowl fairly model an accidental process? No.

Neo-Darwinists have tried to verbally co-opt the entire historical process of evolution to their political view of atheism/materialism by forcibly stamping the word accidental on anything and everything in sight no matter how nonrandom a given process can be demonstrated to be! It is like a dictatorship handing out international aid after a hurricane, repackaging it under its own insignia, and reaping a windfall of votes in the upcoming election. What the neo-Darwinists do by misconstruing the evidence in this way is nothing short of “Intellectual Claim Jumping!”

There is nothing accidental about the world implied in Strickberger’s bowl of adaptive form change possibilities. He may say, “Well, it simply represents an uncanny string of luck that just so happened to have that effect. We are not justifying the history of evolution, we are simply describing it.” This is the kind of answer Doolittle gives. In other words, any option in the deck can come out in an accidental or random deal, no matter how improbable that option may be. And, from a philosopher’s point of view, this much is true; anything can happen minus a causal explanation to the contrary. But from a scientist’s point of view, it is not true because science must affirm the most probable expectation. To say anything can happen is not to give a scientific explanation at all (or an explanation of any kind), but to forsake the possibility of explanation. It is therefore terribly wrong to propound accident as the best explanation evolutionary science can produce for the origin and evolution of life. It is only trivially true to say that any hand can come out of a deck with only one ace and a trillion, trillion, trillion…(continued to 52 repetitions) cards as we see the evolutionary deck to contain. And it is as contrary to the method and practice of science as anything can be to propose the receipt of that one ace as a scientifically justifiable expectation.

Dr. Stephen Meyer, citing the work of D. D. Axe, has told us that protein synthesis studies show that less than a handful of random amino acid substitutions will destroy the viability of the protein—generally more than one random change is too many.[167] DNA mutations are predominantly deleterious as well. An accidental process simply will not produce the neat and clean lockstep road to inevitable progress that Strickberger portrays in his diagram. Ironically, what Strickberger has proved, is not accidental evolution, but a large bias for life! He has “illegally” jumped the proper intellectual claim of intelligent design theory.

There is yet another fallacy in Figure 4-2, a mathematical one. It involves a gross violation of the rules of standard probability theory. Strickberger pulls an odd math trick on us concerning how to compute the improbability of achieving multiple steps in a sequential process. In his example a preservation mechanism intervenes to guarantee the continued availability of viable adaptations achieved in preceding steps. This is the machine building machine at work again. Strickberger doesn’t say how such a biased process came to be by accident, he just takes it for granted. Having noted, but not explained, the existence of the machine building machine, he feels justified in ignoring the improbability of the initial achievement of each individual step in evolution. The bias in nature’s machine takes care of it; it is as simple as that. Walla booby! Accidental evolution proved!

The math of Professor Strickberger’s probability formula here is just wrong. Its effect is to seriously mislead readers on the critical question of whether or not accidental evolution is too improbable to be a plausible theory. Strickberger makes overcoming the improbability of Darwinian evolution sound like a walk in the park, when it is a walk in Jurassic Park! He says that because natural selection can lock in adaptive combinations it can reduce the total improbability of the complete set of steps in a long sequence to no more than the improbability of the final step. This violates the standard rules of probability computation. The improbabilities of two or more succeeding steps in a process must always be multiplied no matter how strongly some physical event process intervenes to lock an earlier step into place: “…the chance that two or more independent events will occur together is the product of their chances of occurring separately.”[168]

Although natural selection may or may not be all that Strickberger will own up to being involved in the amazingly successful string of increasingly adaptive steps seen to have occurred in biological evolution, it is not all that Figure 4-2 implies. Natural selection only locks in adaptations advantageous for the present; it does not increase the likelihood of future adaptation as Strickberger’s model does. Adding the ability to facilitate future adaptations is beyond natural selection and constitutes a machine building machine, not an accidental event flow. Natural selection cannot help construct the next step in the tree of life, but only to preserve the previous steps that have been achieved. Strickberger’s model of evolution, however, “says” that nature finds a way to make future advantageous steps more and more likely all the time. Since natural selection cannot this and Strickberger specifies no definite mechanism to take its place there is a ghost in Strickberger’s machine. That ghost is as likely to be intelligent design as anything else, perhaps the Holy Ghost.

Natural selection only reduces the improbability for accidental evolution from an incomprehensibly enormous magnitude to one that is by scientific standards still fully impossible in the available time. Reuse of previously designed component systems, of course, is another matter; reuse does decrease probability somewhat, though not nearly the magnitude required. The improbability of initially achieving an adaptation needn’t be counted over and over again in subsequent reuse via inheritance or by other means of transfer, true—if transfer from the original organism is unproblematic. Random transfer is problematic however. Direct inheritance is the only route that holds the line on probability in reuse. But neither the preservation process of natural selection nor the possibility of reuse removes the requirement to compute the improbability of achieving each unique step of the total process of life’s origin and development in the first instance.

Strickberger’s math argument on page 58-60 (1^st Edition) is like advising a tourist to bet their life savings on a new version of craps in Las Vegas. In this game the house says your odds will improve because the attendant will firmly hold the first of every two die you roll in its place, guaranteeing that its value never changes until the second die is rolled. Keep your money in the bank; your odds don’t change. You are still rolling two dice and confronting the same improbability implicit in rolling two sequential rolls faced by everyone else. The odds of rolling two 6s in succession will remain 1 chance in 36, not, as Strickberger’s model suggests, 1 chance in 6. Evolution must accomplish millions of unique steps in succession, most of them highly improbable in themselves, and we are entitled to ignore the cost of none of them in their initial occurrence.

Strickberger says the achievement of the tree of life is made fully tractable to an accidental process by his line of reasoning; that it is so easy that no competent scientist should give the matter a second thought. This is far from true. The straightforward improbability of achieving a human being with a 3,000,000,000bp genome, 100,000,000,000 neurons with thousands of connecting fibers, 900 billion glial cells in the brain, 10,000,000,000,000 cells in the body each using hundreds to thousands of the total inventory of 85,000 unique proteins that make up the human body, each distinct protein improbable in itself to a magnitude of 10^-77, each cell doing hundreds of tasks per minute, the total organism integrating hundreds of intricate biological machines all working closely together in close precision, this is far beyond the magnitude that would exhaust all of the time and physical resources of the universe before an accidental process could achieve human life. Strickberger, along with Richard Dawkins, however, assures us that his bowl of adaptive changes makes achieving the design of a human being as easy as pie. Of course, when you put a ghost in the machine much can be done in little time. In Air Force technical training we used to attribute such unexplained critical steps to FM (freaky magic).

In Figure 4-2 Strickberger is only right in so far as he says that nature has acted as if it had a bowl full of useful biological changes ready, but this does not justify the potency of an accidental process as he suggests. Rather it suggests that purpose or design has been built in. Strickberger has co-opted G. G. Simpson’s example of how nature impressively increases the odds of successful adaptation over time almost verbatim—but he has left out the punch line: an accidental process would not do this. Simpson admitted that accident could achieve no such thing and even allowed the possibility that God was the planner whose purpose was manifested in the strong bias that brought about life against all odds.[169]

The important thing to note is that for each of the thousands of unique biological machines in nature the first instance of each had to be constructed from scratch, as it were, without the use of previously achieved design components. If it takes four 1,000bp genes to generate a standard biological machine component, the improbability for the sequential achievement of a thousand such components, assuming nothing is reused, is (4 X 10^-77) X (4 X 10^-77) X (4 X 10^-77) …continued to 1,000 repetitions! Strickberger’s math leads us to believe that the total improbability for this kind of process would be only 4 X 10^-77 simply because natural selection preserves the first machine as a viable achievement, then the second, then the third, and so on. Not so. If we assumed that prior steps can make subsequent ones less improbable, and at times it is certainly true that they can, we still have to look to see what the total improbability of the two steps actually is—less does not equal none. It is also true that many physical processes are irreversible and that the larger course of the cosmos and our biosphere are irreversible. But if the direction to which that course irreversibly points is consistently better and better adaptations for survival fitness in living organisms why would a rational thinker not prefer to ascribe purpose than accident as the cause? FM was only a joke, we always knew the instructor would find the answer within a day or two.

At a minimum each of the unique proteins in life must at least be counted toward the total probability cost of evolution, or each of the unique DNA sequences that correspond to them. Working from the protein side of things, the improbability, strictly computed, equates to 10^-77 X 10^-77 X 10^-77…to at least 200,000 repetitions (assuming a minimum of 200,000 unique proteins occur through the tree of life), or roughly 10^-15,400,000. Alternatively, working from the genome, the improbability is at least 4^{-1,500,000,000}, and this accounts for only half the human genome (after subtracting the presumed to be “junk” portion which will probably turn out to be non-junk).[170] An accidental process attempting to achieve such an improbable result would exhaust the physical and time resources of the universe (which is only 10¹⁵⁰ particle events) trillions upon trillions upon trillions of times over. Strickberger portrays the accidental evolutionary process as so easy as to be nothing worthy of the concern of science, when in no other field of science would such an improbability be endorsed as even a remote hypothesis.

Contrary to what Strickberger has done, G. G. Simpson did not say that the improbability of the evolutionary process is reduced by increasingly adaptive combinations. Rather, Simpson was saying that, despite astronomical improbability, evolution has succeeded in assembling more and more useable component modules over time while simultaneously excluding more and more nonuseable options from the input side of the genome transforming process. Simpson says that nature’s tendency to increasingly lock in more and more adaptive combinations explains, not why the process is less improbable than it looks, but how evolution managed to achieve the highly improbable. Since accident could achieve neither such a mechanic nor such a result, Simpson conceded that evolution was accomplished in a nonaccidental way. Once again we have nature portrayed as a machine building machine, not an accident.

The only difficulty I see in Simpson’s view is that he goes on to call the bias for life in nature a new and more powerful form of natural selection. He says this has been amply demonstrated, while citing no studies whatsoever. Regrettably, I am forced to give Simpson both the “Where’s Waldo” and the FM award here. He is referring to something the mechanics of which, like Dawkins’ “cumulative selection,” either cannot be coherently described or can now, given modern genetics and biochemistry, be demonstrated to be false.

A bias of the kind Simpson and Strickberger describe in the bowl of letters analogies is not natural selection in any sense close enough to the original meaning of the term sufficient to justify continuing use of the term. This can only breed confusion. The core of Simpson’s evolutionary dynamic is a heavy bias directed towards construction of the fit. The new and powerful version of “natural selection” referred to by Simpson turns out to be “natural,” of course, and it does “select” in Fox’s sense of molecular selection. But it does not select in Darwin’s sense; it is not survival of the fittest. An accidental process would not have given natural selection many fit organisms, if any, from which to choose the fittest. The mechanic Simpson describes, and what we actually see in the fossil record, in contrast, is strongly geared toward an increasingly fit product. This is much more akin to a chemical selection that favors the biotic molecules of life, such as has been described by Sidney Fox, or something closely akin to the self-organization tendency of the genomes to form themselves into more and more complex versions that has been studied by Stuart Kauffman—more likely a combination of the two with Michael Denton’s stronger formulation of natural law thrown in.[171] In other words, this is self-organization on a grand scale. Such mechanisms of self-organization are tools an intelligent designer could use, and they could not plausibly be the manifestation of an accident.

In Simpson’s model, nature selects what it prefers based upon natural laws (some perhaps yet to be elucidated) and further biases impressed into the informed state of matter and energy at the start of the universe at the Big Bang. This is not a neo-Darwinian concept. It does not “say” that nature favors designs from among those randomly produced that can best survive, it says that nature has a strong bias for producing such designs in the first place. Randomness is no longer the engine that drives biological form variation here. Furthermore, to have such a bias sufficient to offset known to be astronomical improbabilities and to actually achieve the tree of life with a finely tuned ecosystem that supports the continuance of life is the intelligent design argument—practically Genesis itself! Or it is as close to Genesis as a rational person could expect physical science to ever approach. Here again Strickberger is seen to be claim jumping. He has taken evidence properly supportive of intelligent design and misconstrued it to be evidence for the potency of an accidental process. You are the claims court; you be the judge.

One has to be very careful, to remain alert for both logical error and linguistic confusion when reading Darwinian literature. In the course of reading no more than two brief and innocuous looking sentences concerning the “bowl of letters” analogy, one in Simpson, and the other in Strickberger, we are moved fully from the admission of the observed fact that the improbability of life fully forbids its accidental achievement to the exact opposite, a new neo-Darwinian “proof” that accident could create life standing on its head. All this based upon nothing more than an imaginary bowl full of alphabet soup! “Walla Booby! Accidental evolution proved at last. Come one, come all. Everyone wins at Strickberger’s lottery!” Please…

OK, Fine. Natural Selection Fails. But Doesn’t Natural Law Make the Accidental Issue Go Away?

Darwinists and even some laymen may intuitively object: "Natural law has the ability to produce order. So let’s not call the evolutionary process accidental, let’s just say it wasn’t’ done on purpose. Then we don’t have to look ridiculous trying to explain the fantastically sophisticated designs and highly ordered systems of nature as resulting from accidents because natural law itself explains everything." Walla Booby! Neo-Darwinian evolution proved at last, right? Not quite.

First of all, if it’s not accidental, it’s not neo-Darwinian. Second, saying that nature is a machine-building machine does not relieve us of the difficulty inherent in explaining how an accident can make a sophisticated machine (millions of them), it replaces the problem with one that is more difficult: explaining how accident can make a machine-building machine that then makes millions of sophisticated machines, the blueprint for which is, ostensibly, but certainly not demonstrably, contained in natural law. Neo-Darwinists may respond by saying, “Well nothing made natural law it just is.” But to say that something “just is” is not to offer a scientific explanation, it is to forsake scientific explanation. Taking this position reduces neo-Darwinian theory to superstition or unjustified faith. It ceases to be a scientific theory and, as Christoph Cardinal Schönborn said in the New York Times editorial, becomes mere ideology.

And, naturally, there is an additional problem. Stephen Meyer, citing the seminal works of Yockey and Polanyi, explains that, based upon what we know of natural law at the present time, the level of complexity and the type of information science can currently demonstrate to be inherent in natural law, that is, its magnitude, complexity, mathematical, logical and structural form visibly mismatches, and certainly does not entail, the more complex design information of living creatures.[172] Natural law, therefore, cannot qualify as a full explanation of life until it can be shown to be capable of generating the more complex forms of information resident in living designs.

To the extent that we have presently described them, our natural laws are merely compatible with the origination and evolutionary development of life; they do not require it. Almost certainly the demonstration of a greater information content in natural law sufficient to entail life will never be achieved because the informed content of matter and energy at the Big Bang is itself a large component of the total information needed to generate life. Should we ever complete the tracing of the chain of physical information in a rigorous way, it is possible that it will be demonstrated both that all the needed information did not come from the Big Bang and that natural law is incapable of generating it. In this case, the only alternative remaining will be that some subsequent event or group of events, miracles or singularities, miraculous exceptions to natural law such as the Big Bang itself and black holes are considered to be, occurred that imposed additional information content onto matter and energy in a manner that cannot be further traced. Materialist scientists will no doubt object that such a thing is unthinkable for science to propose, while they accept with complete equanimity the description of billions of black holes as singularities where the laws of physics break down as well as the singularity at the Big Bang that is the source of absolutely everything in our universe.

From my perspective, the logic Meyer uses in his summary refutation of structuralism in “The Origin of Biological Information” is good. The only natural laws with proximate application to the spontaneous assembly of biological machines are the laws of chemistry. But the laws of chemistry are known, and they are known to be relatively simple in comparison to the astronomically complex information rich content of living organisms. However, this may only seem so because science has yet to fully describe the natural processes of the physical-chemical reactions that may have spawned life down into the subatomic/electromagnetic level. What might be happening at the level of the electromagnetic properties of molecules or even the quantum level remains to be seen. At these lower levels information structures may ultimately be found fully sufficient to entail the complex design structures of life given the initially informed state of matter and energy (assuming we could ever map such an enormous and intricate matrix). At least a demonstration may someday be made that a statistical bias exists in natural law sufficient to guarantee life’s ultimate creation given billions of years of time.

Personally, I fully expect this to occur. I predict that a visible advancement toward such a demonstration will continue from this day forward. In other words, the self-organization theorists don’t yet know how right they are! After all, life did originate somehow. The only alternative to an impotent accident or a potent self-organizational bias is a direct and continuous intervention of the designer/creator of life. Of the three possibilities, the first is impossible and the third is presumed to be beyond the demonstration of science, ruled out almost universally even by theologians. Fully capable “self-organization,” which equates to a machine building machine, is really the only plausible explanation of life. It is also one which strongly suggests intelligent design. Being compatible with intelligent design, it should not be portrayed as a mutually exclusive alternative to it. One could add a personal philosophy to the concept of self-organization viz that the universe is “just that way.” But that is merely philosophy, not science, and it is contrary to science because it forsakes the possibility of explanation entirely.

In the meantime, pending radical advances in the explanation of proteomics and other biological systems that can reach down into the subatomic level, we know only the rudiments of the basic kinds of standard molecules that tend to spontaneously form. We know that the self-organization of a few amino acids and protocells can occur. Simple self-propagating catalytic reactions that have points of similarity to our sugar based metabolic process might be captured temporarily in a micro spherule along with a few amino acids, and possibly even a couple of heat-generated proteins of no use to life…but that’s about it.[173] In other words, science can explain a simple form of natural flatulence. What it cannot explain is the origination of a true life form having design structures so magnificent as to dwarf any machine we can ourselves create. It cannot explain a human being. At times the neo-Darwinian rhetoric reaches such a nonsensical pitch that one is tempted to describe it as flatulence describing flatulence.[174]

When one looks at natural law in isolation, he or she has to say that, yes, there is significant ordered information content inherent in natural law. It permits some basic structure to arise out of what would otherwise be chaos, and preserves order over time. But so does a child produce order out of a pile of building blocks, tinker toys or Lincoln logs. That does not mean, however, that the child can go into a nuclear power plant and repair the electronic console (the incentive of free donuts notwithstanding). Such tasks require a different order of magnitude of information generating capacity than the child can produce. There is a threshold there.

The event process requisite to the origin and development of the tree of life may harbor many such thresholds. Any one of them might defeat either an accidental process or one having a limited information generating capacity, such as natural law now appears. Crossing any one or more of those thresholds does not guarantee that the next one can be crossed. For example, lets start at the beginning, abiogenesis, the transition of life from nonliving chemicals. The public, and perhaps many scientists, from the initial forays into origins of life science in the 1950’s perhaps even until the present time have assumed that the most difficult step in the origin of life/evolution was the first one. Recent speculations about ultra-simple protocells however, although they are probably not truly alive, show that the first step may not be the most difficult.

The kinds of simple information structures in natural law are incapable of generating astronomically complex, highly differentiated, living, interactive systems. Living systems have billions long sequences of precisely formatted DNA code with a corresponding translation system, error checking and repair system, protein and organelle construction system, systems regulation system, materiel transportation systems, immune (defense) systems, nervous system and conscious brain, a developmental genome which directs the construction of the entire body from nothing more than handful of cells, and a nine level deep vertically stacked organizational hierarchy of biological machines and systems of machines embedded into each other. They move and breathe, repair and reproduce themselves. To create such complex forms of life, natural law would require a much richer information structure than science has heretofore ever theoretically attributed to it.

Consider the process of cell replication in complex organisms. The first step, initiation, alone has five component steps, each impressive in its own right.

Eukaryotic DNA replication is regulated to ensure all chromosomes replicate once and only once per cell cycle. Replication begins at many origins scattered along each chromosome. Except for building yeast, origins are not defined DNA sequences and probably are inherited by epigenetic mechanisms. lnitiation at origins occurs throughout the S phase according to a temporal program that is important in regulating gene expression during development…the mechanism of initiation is conserved and consists of origin recognition, assembly of pre-replication (pre-RC) initiative complexes, helicase activation, and replisome loading. Cell cycle regulation by protein phosphorylation ensures that pre-RC assembly can only occur in G1 phase, whereas helicase activation and loading can only occur in S phase. Checkpoint regulation maintains high fidelity by stabilizing replication forks and preventing cell cycle progression during replication stress or damage.[175]

One really has to say it; isn’t this exactly the kind of language one expects NASA to use to describe a lunar module or some piece of intricate scientific equipment? Yet, neo-Darwinists stubbornly insist there is no justification for the intelligent design inference from nature. But I digress. The question is, can accident cross this threshold of complexity? I would say clearly not. Can natural law cross it in the sense of not mere allowing the construction of such a system but compelling it. Not as we currently understand natural law; they are too simple. The intelligent design objection to dumping the entire burden of explaining life onto natural law says that our natural laws correspond to the child in the nuclear power plant analogy. Natural laws say things like gasses expand, apples fall down, disorganization tends to increase, chemical bonds form between physical elements when they share an electron, and so on. Natural law does not say that life must form; it only says that it may form.

If the full information content of matter and energy imposed at the Big Bang could be fully traced down to the electromagnetic properties of molecules at the atomic level (for that is apparently where the trail of information leads) it is possible that the combination of natural law and the informed state of matter and energy would say that life must form. But, once we have elucidated that further information content and laid it out for inspection it might well strike us as a cut and dried case for an intelligent designer of life and the cosmos. Thus the current neo-Darwinian tactic of trying to claim the defense of the additional information content of natural law before that content is discovered and analyzed is invalid. That information may turn out to be the strongest argument intelligent design theorists will ever have. Thus the neo-Darwinists are trying to cheat. They are attempting to contrive a risk-free argument by alluding to future discoveries and anticipating the outcome of future investigations in their favor. Michael Denton has called their bluff, however, in his paper on the apparently predetermined nature of protein folds. This clearly shows that the trend in recent research is hugely in favor of intelligent design. It supports neither accident nor dumb laws that inexplicably do the equivalent of miracles. Protein interactions are so complex that our most powerful computers cannot model them. Protein folding characteristics drive the bulk of that complexity. What Denton has revealed is that our natural laws are probably not dumb at all, but very smart indeed.

Evolutionist Simon Conway Morris has been saying for quite a few years now that life is inevitable (on Earth). Michael Denton in his latest book, Nature’s Destiny, pretty much stamps that hypothesis confirmed. Denton goes yet a further step in that direction in his article for the Journal of Theoretical Biology, “The Protein Folds as Platonic Forms.” Here he gives a concrete example, and an enormous one, of a new discovery that reveals much more complexly informed directionality in the natural laws of physics and biology than has been previously elucidated (predefined parameters for protein folds, which ground the larger part of the meaningful side of biological systems). This is precisely the kind of thing neo-Darwinians would have to point to give force to the explanation of life via natural law, but it is also precisely the kind of thing that constitutes a funnel that directs natural processes inexorably towards the formation of life. Neo-Darwinists have always loudly denied the existence of such a funnel because, by giving direction to evolution it makes the process nonaccidental. This opens the door to the ID hypothesis.

Further revelations of the information content in matter and energy may prove Denton and Morris quite correct (they don’t necessarily agree with each other on all aspects of theory, of course). But such a world where life is inevitable is certainly more than compatible with the thesis of the intelligent design of life; it is fully evocative of it.

The 1^st grader trying to repair Homer’s electronic console at the nuclear power plant can, in theory, assemble and connect all the correct wires, circuit boards, transformers and microprocessors to avoid a meltdown, but must he or she do it? More to the point, should we expect her to do it in the available time? The evolutionary question everyone has ignored so far in preference to “Could it conceivably have happened?” is “Is the theory that the 1^st grader will succeed at accidentally fixing the electronic circuitry of a nuclear power plant with limited resources and limited time a good scientific theory?” “Can we conceive of it?” is a far different question than “Is it a good scientific theory?” And, if the young man or woman does inexplicably succeed in the repairs for several years running with no mistakes, aren’t we entitled to infer that he has gotten some intelligent help? Until neo-Darwinists demonstrate how such an unlikely thing is possible, it is not a reasonable assumption to believe natural law alone will generate complex living organisms. Until further information is discovered that adds the informational content and physical constraints needed (there is nothing to suggest it will be), believing that natural law alone can generate life is a matter of faith in the materialist/atheist religion; it is not science.

Science today affirms in its many separate branches that the most probable explanation is the best. The most probable line of argument here obligates us to affirm that an accidental process would never have achieved and held such an astronomically complex bias for more than an instant, let al.one 20 billion years. Moreover, until we see the newly hypothesized patterns of information some defenders of neo-Darwinism imply might be inherent in natural law we won’t know that those patterns don’t imply intelligent design more strongly than the current arguments of ID theorists! Until the hypothesized new information content and organizing capacity are specified, empirically demonstrated, and laid out for inspection we are quite simply neither bound to believe such a capacity exists in natural law nor safely assured of what its implications might be.

In essence, neo-Darwinists are merely pushing off the explanation of design information that we can already confirm to be present to another deeper area we have yet to fully investigate, asking us to irrationally assume that the information content there would not have to be of at least equivalent complexity to the already known biological information structures it is said to be capable of generating. If we do find a richer information content in natural law in the future, we will still need an explanation for its being there.

The Explanatory Requirement for Purpose

The bottom line is that we cannot explain the complex structures of life without recourse to a purposeful process. Every bit of experience and evidence we have on the subject of complex design construction shows that it must be a purpose driven process to succeed. Neo-Darwinists will object that natural selection has been "demonstrated" to favor the best designs in nature. Be that as it may, the fact remains that natural selection does not build anything, it only selects the best from among those designs already built. In Darwin’s time when we thought biological machines were easy to build the tag team of accidental construction and natural selection made sense; today it doesn’t.

In a typical instance of neo-Darwinian oversimplification, in The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins says that tossing airplane parts around randomly will construct an airplane as quickly and efficiently as tossing rocks around will achieve the specific configuration of a mountain that is formed substantially by large rocks. He says that the probabilities of achieving either by accident are roughly the same as the other. Not so. Dawkins is ignoring the fact that precise physical control guided by intelligent thought is required to place and hold the closely matched parts of an airplane in physical proximity to each other for the welding, soldering, bolting, screwing, and riveting operations to be successful. No amount of tossing and shaking will build an airplane. Only Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis agree with Dawkins on this (Oh yes, also Willy Wanka and Rube Goldberg). Human beings, or robots created by them, are required to get an airplane together and we have already seen how improbable the creation of a human being is. I will say it again, guided, controlled, and directed action from an intentional being is required to assemble certain kinds of machines, otherwise further tinkering will only move the situation further from the goal, not towards it.

A certain ratio of competence, one might say, must be maintained between he or she (or it) who is attempting a task and the complexity of the job. Professor William Dembski, a consummate mathematician with five graduate degrees, calls this the Law of Conservation of Information (which it is). You can’t get more information out of a process than you put into it. In the Air Force we called it being smarter than the machine.

My son is currently an F-16 Crew Chief for the Air Force. I was a USAF Munitions Systems Technician, and after retirement from the Air Force achieved certification as a Novell computer network engineer. My son and I (and anyone else who has worked in the aerospace industry) can both certify that the operations of assembling and maintaining a properly functional airplane, guided missile, or computer system are enormously more complex and improbable than forming a mountain by tossing rocks. Dawkins’ analogy is seriously broken; the tasks are not at all in the same ball park of complexity. I do not wish to represent myself as a computer scientist; I am not. I am an independent philosopher and an informed lay Catholic who takes an interest in science and theology. But when your computer system at work breaks it is nearly always a networking specialist like me who comes to fix it, not a scientist.

All one has to do to assemble Dawkins’ mountain (after many days at the gym plus a few creatine milkshakes) is shake and re-toss until the rocks settle. Dawkins ignores a myriad of relevant features of aircraft design, such as bolt torque specifications, pressurized hydraulic fluid (critical to operating brakes and the powerful control surfaces of the wings and tail), jet fuel, high pressure air cartridges, and (in some models) explosive bolts. How do you “toss” hydraulic fluid around and get it to fall into the proper reservoirs within the same time needed to toss rocks around to fall into place in a mountain. Which accidental forces hold a component in place by exerting forward pressure while simultaneously applying clockwise torque to bolt to a precisely specified tolerance. How do you “toss” air into a highly compressed cylinder or jet fuel into the tank? How do you “toss” bundles of wiring and miniaturized electronic circuit boards together? How do you “toss” explosive cartridges together and then toss them into place without setting them off first?

How do you toss grease into miniature fittings that require a practically perfect seal from a closely fitted nozzle of a grease gun with a precisely focused pressurized delivery system in order to fill the lubrication port and reservoir on the landing gear? Tossing the necessary fluids alone, in the real world as opposed to the imagination where the neo-Darwinians do their work, is practically an irreversible slide into ever increasing disorganization. Fluid is scattered about in droplets and small pools on the first toss, more so on the second, and so on. The task of organizing it just becomes harder all the time. The neo-Darwinists will inevitably say that they can easily imagine it being done. “Don’t worry, nature will find a way to do it.”

Consider, too, that complex living systems don’t just have to be created, they have to be scrupulously maintained. Biological maintenance systems are as complex as the primary structural design and functions. In stark contrast, mountains comprised of a large configuration of rocks require very little maintenance to preserve their organizational structure, which involves no moving parts. Here again Dawkins’ oversimplified analogy dramatically fails. We are trying much too hard to defeat a transparently bogus argument, and in the process giving it more credibility than it deserves. Outside the realm of neo-Darwinian imagination, that is, in the real world, even something so simple as a basketball cannot be created and maintained by accident. Air tends to escape from the ball, causing deflation and failure of function over time, but air does not tend to periodically inject itself back into the ball in order to maintain its functional state.

Granted, due to the ability of cell membranes to take in fluids through osmosis and to control fluid loss with an organized system, fluids management does not pose the irreversibility problem with living machines, once they are achieved, that it poses for the accidental construction of airplanes and other machines made of hard materials. But, as we have seen, the physiology of living creatures has its own points of difficulty. One must examine the characteristics of the machine in question to see where the difficulties in construction unique to that particular machine lie. The human body is demonstrably many orders of magnitude more complex than an airplane and has its own unique points of difficulty vis-à-vis accidental construction. Dawkins admits this and tries to avoid the dilemma by saying that the process of evolution is not accidental at all, for accident could clearly achieve nothing of the kind (G. G. Simpson admitted the same thing)—but, he goes on to say, neither is it on purpose.[176] In chapter 3 of The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins attempts to coherently pose a third alternative to chance and purpose/intelligent design, which he calls “cumulative selection,” which is intended to allow the retention of an accidental worldview while demonstrating the process of evolution itself to be nonaccidental.

Richard Dawkins, in his unique genius, has created what my grandfather would call an “odd bird,” a “nonaccidental”-accidental world. Dawkins says that an extraordinary series of selections occur that key upon survival fitness. These selections are made upon very small variations, each of which is simple enough that accident could achieve it. He asserts that those small steps then all fall together in sort of a modular fashion. Walla Booby, a complex biological machine has been constructed! Not quite. Which machine? What steps? He doesn’t say. But we can rest assured that it all happens over long periods of time and endless selection events. “Cumulative selection.” Right.

This is a wonderful idea in the abstract. It is in fact exactly Charles Darwin’s original concept: a long series of gradual small changes. There are two rather serious downsides to it, however. First, it contradicts everything we know about genetics and microbiology. Being Darwin’s theory exactly, it is a protoplasm era theory. In the mid nineteenth century Darwin and his contemporaries didn’t know there were microscopic machines in the cell, they didn’t know there was a genome. They didn’t know amino acids and proteins were intricately involved and so complex that an accident couldn’t find a functional alteration in a million years. They didn’t know. They thought the cell was full of nondescript goo, protoplasm, and thus nothing stood in the way of small spontaneous accidental variations being tolerated while design modifications evolved.

Modern research tells us that the genome and the amino acids are much too sensitive to tolerate tinkering and that the new configurations needed for an evolutionary advancement that natural selection could act upon are out of reach of an accidental search and implementation process. Can life be built in steps so small an accident could achieve them? No. An accumulation of small random changes to amino acids will destroy the functionality of a protein whenever more than three amino acids are affected.[177] An average protein may consist of 100 amino acid residues (some go as large as 10,000). Being restricted to altering less than four amino acids, accident cannot produce a change to biological components substantial enough to affect survival fitness. Thus, accident can provide natural selection nothing to select upon. If the complexity, elegance, and meaningful genetic libraries of living designs can be compared to Shakespeare’s plays, modern biochemistry and genetics has revealed that natural selection requires something on the order of from meaningful phrases to whole paragraphs to select upon as a fitness enhancing form variation. In contrast, what an accidental process can be demonstrated capable of producing is a stickman or a happy face.

Upon recourse to the actual facts of biology, Dawkins’ model is seen to be only an ingenious fiction, an imaginary process created wholly in the realm of abstract thought; it doesn’t work with real biological components. Trying to chain a long series of amino acid substitutions, or even smaller single nucleotide substitutions, does not alter the impassability of the 4 amino acid barrier. Whenever the sequential accidents add up to 4 amino acid substitutions the affected protein becomes dysfunctional and the creatures progeny are selected against; the altered gene line is eventually lost to history.

Yes, one can imagine a situation where the injured creature reproduces prodigiously prior to the loss of the gene line, and this could often happen. A series of such injurious alterations then could occur, one building on the other until, rarely, a new beneficial protein was constructed. The problem with this is that recent research indicates that it is improbable to the tune of 10^-77. Achieving only two proteins in this way is less likely than not achieving them—ever, given the entire history of the universe with which to work. The full resource base of particle events for the history of the universe is only 10¹⁵⁰.[178] Achieving two biologically viable proteins by accident is improbable to the extent of 10^-154. Assuming standard probability theory, the average outcome requires a number of attempts equal to half the total improbability to achieve the result, in this case two viable proteins. However, half of 10^-154 is still 5 X 10^-153. The universe cannot afford to make the achievement of even two viable proteins by accident more probable than not (that is, at least 51% probable). Science can never legitimately support the expectation of the less probable over the more probable. Thus Dawkins’ “cumulative selection” process is not scientifically defensible.

The second downside to Dawkins’ view is that gives no real explanation. Saying that it all just falls together in a bunch of small accidental steps without specifying which steps, and without observing, testing and replicating those steps under scientifically controlled conditions doesn’t add anything to “It just happens.” Can this be our best scientific explanation, one that is hailed as an indisputable fact?

Dawkins’ more general view of the process of mutation, in that it involves reducing the focus of random change to a shorter segment of the genome, would speed up the process of reaching the 4-amino-acid/2-protein barrier, but there is still no way of randomly breaching that barrier once it is encountered. One way to save Dawkins’ cumulative selection process is to say that the four amino acid barrier just so happens to be consistently overcome by sheer chance. But the odds of doing that to the tune of the tens of thousands of new proteins that must be generated for the tree of life equates to an improbability so immense as to be an unscientific hypothesis.

One might say with Doolittle and others who believe it is reasonable to believe that anything whatsoever might happen that “Well, we can never fully rule out such an unlikely string of accidents. It could happen.” Yes, it could happen, but asserting that it did happen or will happen can never qualify as a credible theory of science. If such a thing were to happen against all odds, however, it would still not be Dawkins’ process of “cumulative selection” because natural selection cannot see the small changes that an accident can produce (with the exception of the many that serious harm or kill the organism). The neutral ones have no effect on survival fitness. The cost in time and resources for accident to construct the beneficial modifications that natural selection can see puts them beyond the budget our universe can afford. Fitness is (normally) only altered when a complex set of several genes and proteins have been constructed sufficient to alter the functional capabilities of the organism, and a way found to integrate those changes into an existing highly sophisticated, interactive, and usually delicate design. There are a few exceptions, some simple changes that do alter fitness, color or size change, for example, but such things cannot be chained together to make an elephant out of an amoeba.

Alternatively, one can simply say that the evolutionary process is somehow directed, guided, controlled or constrained such that the proper amino acid changes are always offered in contravention of what a random process would do. Yes, one can say it, and many competent scientists are now saying it. But such a scenario is one of intelligent design! One cannot say that the process is directed and guided and simultaneously deny intelligent design without offering a concrete alternative source for the direction, guidance, and complex design information. Dawkins recognized the need for specifying the alternative, but the alternative he offered in The Blind Watchmaker, “cumulative selection,” fails for the reasons cited.

One might object that not all airplanes have explosive bolts, and that people certainly don’t, which is true. But this only highlights the need to closely describe a system before computing the complexity and probability of its being achieved by accident. Dawkins and the neo-Darwinists have not done this in regards to the human body and the total tree of life, which is the system that must be explained. They keep their discussion of probabilities in the realm of abstract examples and artificial models. The models, being fully disconnected from the concrete facts of biology and the innumerable limiting factors entailed by those facts, are therefore invalid.

Intelligent design theorists, on the other hand, do probability estimates properly by grounding them in the facts of microbiology and genetics. The only thing Richard Dawkins achieves with the “cumulative selection” concept is to help Emile Borel’s monkeys reach the works of Shakespeare more quickly in the artificial world of pure mathematics. But, who cares; we don’t live in that world. It is not the world evolution occurred in. None of the real-world barriers to random construction of biological machines are overcome by the “cumulative selection” hypothesis for the simple reason that it does not address the facts of biology.

Dawkins’ view is, however, truly insightful in other ways. In repeatedly altering the same small segment of code vice spreading the same number of alterations over an entire genome, evolution is enormously aided. This part of Dawkins’ discussion (the “Methinks it is a weasel” segment) is both ingenious and ingenuous. Dawkins did not invent the idea, however. Drake’s quote on Localized Genetic Instabilities offered above in the section on Punctuated Equilibrium, essentially shows that nature does, at least at times, use this time saving device of focusing mutations on a small segment instead of spreading them so thinly around the massive genome that their effect would be negligible. Narrowing the focus of mutations to hot spots does in fact save evolution enormous amounts of time, and therefore, such a procedure is almost certainly a prime player in the actual event of evolution. Hot spots have been documented in evolutionary research since before Drake’s book, The Molecular Basis of Evolution, hit the presses in 1970. However, for the process to have an opportunity to proceed past the 4 amino acid barrier and get a chance to accomplish the larger bulk of evolution’s work, the targeting of nucleotides and amino acids must be made nonrandom. Simply approaching the 4 amino acid barrier with speed, as this mechanism does, adds nothing to help surmount it.

There is another, stronger, consideration, a theoretical one, that literally proves that our natural laws taken as a complete set are not the source of order in the universe. The 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics tells us that this natural law governed universe is winding down in terms of ordered content; it is moving towards increased disorganization, or entropy. Entropy or disorganization tends to increase with every physical transaction that occurs and never decreases. The effect of our natural laws taken together as a complete set, then, because they all conform to and implement the more basic 2^nd Law, is not to increase order at all, but to decrease it. They only govern the dynamic transactions of physical forces and objects, managing the order already present, and guiding transformations of one form to another. But all the while they require the average loss of some energy to entropic disorganization.

This does not preclude the formation of life in a subsystem of the universe where localized increases in order can be offset by losses elsewhere, but it does mean that when the natural laws were first applied to the initial increment of matter and energy at the Big Bang natural law could not have been the source of the initial order imposed upon that matter and energy at the Big Bang because the best natural law can do is to leave order at the same magnitude in which it was encountered, and then not for long before reducing it. In other words, natural law is a governing system for the order which already exists, it is not a source of the initial order in the universe and the 2^nd Law exacts a periodic maintenance fee that incrementally reduces the total magnitude of order in the universe over time.

Neo-Darwinists are quite fond of reminding us that the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics does not preclude life's formation in a localized subsystem of the universe (like Earth) so long as the entropy of the larger system of the universe does not decrease as a result. This much is true, but it is irrelevant to our argument. What the defenders of neo-Darwinian evolution fail to note is that the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics reveals that natural law is not, and cannot be, the original source of the order in the universe. Thus, natural law is not the explanation for life, the singularity of the Big Bang that provided the initial information content of the mass and energy, which singularity looks exactly like a miracle, is the explanation of life.

While neo-Darwinian theory gives us a fatally flawed answer to the origins question by focusing exclusively on the one single thing in all of creation that by definition embeds no ordered information, accidental mutations, and therefore is the least likely to account for the origin of ordered systems, intelligent design theory comprises a genuine explanation of life's origin. One can say that we cannot absolutely prove intelligent design to be true, but the fact remains that it is nonetheless the best explanation, and the only one that accounts for order in the universe.

ID theory answers the hard question: "Where does all the design information first come from?" The natural law based hypothesis that modern neo-Darwinists offer in hopes of fending off valid objections to the capabilities of an accidental process can only answer a different, more limited, question, viz "How is the highly ordered information content of the universe's matter and energy managed and governed after it is originated?"

Ultimately, we must come to grips with the fact that, without purpose, we have absolutely no scientific explanation for either the origination of natural law or the initial order and information structures in the first matter and energy of the universe. These are the two sole sources of the entirety of the order and life spawning ability in nature. Both appear literally "from nowhere" in a fraction of a second in an event acknowledged to be a complete mystery to science. That event looks an awful lot like divine creation. This is why Pope Pius XII celebrated Big Bang theory as proof of creation, not because of his faith alone, but because objective rational evaluation of the scientific evidence says that this is the best explanation: “Let there be light!”

OK, OK. I Give Up. How Can Accidental Evolution Be Demonstrated?

The whole point of the intelligent design argument, of course, is to argue that no such proof can be expected. Accidental mutations carry no information and therefore can produce none. The inherent improbability and destructivity of an accidental process has been made clearly manifest in thousands of mutational studies. But, if Darwinists were to make a more credible effort than they have to date, perhaps the demonstration would go something like this:

Evolutionary News You Can Use☺

Quick sellout at playoffs. Airport gridlock inexplicably linked to genetically evolved gum.

MP (Misappropriated Press)

1 April 2010

Government Chewing Gum Scientists Announce Startling Breakthrough on Evolution!

Undisclosed National Laboratory:

Evolutionary scientists today announced the long awaited results of a tri-decade, multibillion-dollar totally unbiased study on evolution jointly sponsored by the National Academy of Science, American Atheists and CSICOP. In this study genetic material was garnered from a host of clearly beneficial accidental mutations, then massively copied via bacterial plasmid “factories” and distilled into a line of pleasant tasting chewing gums intended for public consumption. In this way anyone who doubts accidental evolution can demonstrate for themselves the enormous capacity for beneficial change that is resident in an accidental process simply by imposing a selected modification on his or her own genome. A few of the more popular flavors are

Embelish-Mint – Said to be the most popular flavor among mainstream evolutionary scientists, this genetic alteration impairs the rational ability to evaluate evidence in such a way that minimal data is exorbitantly overstated. Further study of evolution is then deemed unnecessary. This is clearly beneficial because it allows for a politically expedient proof of the fiction of accidental evolution with a minimal cost to the taxpayer.

Imped-O-Mint – These accidental mutations interfere with brain function such that one cannot properly read a blueprint or follow assembly instructions. The saving grace for evolution in this genetic line is that the gum itself is genetically modified. While dating, the gum lodges between the teeth producing a dark discoloration with an odor so unpleasant as to cause the relationship to be broken off entirely. This reduces population stress, thus optimizing the evolutionary process.

Gov-O-Mint – An unpleasant mix of random flavors that never reach agreement. This alteration achieves no productive result, but is marketed at ten times its value. It clearly demonstrates that neo-Darwinian theory can be successfully applied to social processes as well as biology. This mutation is said to prove once and for all that inefficient processes wasteful of both time and resources are absolutely common in nature. Young consumers will be so affected that they inevitably gravitate to careers in Congress, or become hosts of reality TV.

Pep-O-Mint – Perhaps the flavor with greatest long-term sales potential, this mutation randomly tinkers with the sex hormone regulation of the elderly and is augmented with a dose of Viagra and caffeine so intense as to guarantee that the wife will visit relatives for the entire three weeks of the playoffs. Recommended dosage, four times a year, or as needed.

Many of the elder statesmen of evolutionary biology could not be reached for comment, and, in an odd coincidence, were all observed shuttling from the airport to Ticket-Master.

-----------(MP International)

Completing the Steps in the Chain of Large Scale (macro) Evolution

Very few studies even look at completing the bridge between microevolution and macroevolution. Perhaps that is because it would reveal just how precious few of the steps have been described. In practically none of those few steps we have can we confidently say that, yes, the small variation probably happened through a particular chain of biochemical steps. Forget explaining the big changes; we just don’t have that information. Until a biomechanical bridge between the radically different body types on the tree of life can be established with confidence, the sparse evidence we have of small changes within a few species, are not properly construable as evidence of macroevolution. Further, they are only evidence of microevolutions of the specific types actually seen; they are not evidence that such changes have occurred absolutely everywhere else across the full spectrum of subsystems in all living creatures, especially in contexts involving much greater complexity and interactive requirements.

Niles Eldridge, one of our leading evolutionary theorists, informs us that even now little work is being offered in the direction of completing the bridge between micro and macroevolution. “Little work is geared to bridging the conceptual gap between microevolution and macroevolution, the latter taken simply as large-scale, long-term accrual of adaptive change.”[179] In other words, Darwinian scientists are in the noncritical habit of simply assuming microevolution will add up to macroevolution. Even in this admission Eldridge’s remarks camouflage the significance of the problem. The gap is not merely conceptual as he describes it; it is a physical biochemical gap that is both quantifiable and enormous.

Identical footsteps leading up one side of the Grand Canyon and away from the other side are insufficient to prove a man leaped across, known information being so clearly to the contrary. The appearance of the occasional treetop at random intervals along the route of the canyon is insufficient to provide a genuine path. Yet this is comparable to the amount of the biochemical chain of events of evolution that has actually been demonstrated. The obstacles to an accidental process getting the job done are clear. Ultimately, a bridge is not a bridge until it spans both sides and all the planks in between are reliably installed.

Yet, there are undeniable similarities in the genomes across the tree of life. And, yes, they do argue heavily for inheritance. But they only do that if we grant the validity of the probability argument in the first place. In other words, it is too improbable that such extreme similarity would occur without it having been inherited. Once we grant the probability argument, however, accident is immediately ruled out and we are obliged to acknowledge the plausibility of intelligent design.

The possibility that the import of the current merely fractional data we have might be misleading on some important aspect of evolution is undeniable. In the absence of a biochemical pathway, to call accidental evolution an indisputable fact as neo-Darwinists so prematurely assert, is to anticipate the bulk of the biochemical and genetic data (which remains to be elucidated). This tact is in itself unscientific.

Fossils may have given us the gross superstructure of the event outcomes, but they have not given us the biomechanics. To date we have nothing of substance of the biomechanical pathway of accidental evolution.[180] Everything we do see visibly proclaims it impossible. We are simultaneously witnessing a rapid accumulation of indicators for a guided, directed and self-organizational process, one that is clearly not accidental.

Science is faced with a choice here. It can hold to the rigorous traditional standards of observability, testability, confirmability, refutability and replication necessary to maintain the value and practical application of absolutely everything else that science does in the other branches (the standards that have gotten science this far), or it can put the integrity of all the rest of science at risk in saying theories don’t have to be either testable or visibly in accord with the evidence to be good science. The overall health and integrity of science requires us to exercise more caution in our views of evolution than we have historically expressed. We should have simply and humbly said “We don’t yet know the process of evolution.” Presently, we are entitled go a step further and honestly acknowledge that we have more than enough evidence to rule out an accidental process. This seems imminently preferable to pulling the epistemological integrity out from the under the whole of science.

The neo-Darwinists are slippery, however. When approached with this challenge, they will say that evolutionary science ruled out an accidental process years ago with Hugo de Vries, that we are simply uninformed of the history of science and naïve in our estimate of their professional intellectual prowess. No professional would make such an elementary mistake as to claim that an accident could build a complex machine. (They actually say this!) And yet, what that means in neo-Darwinian-speak is that in their view, although the world is still accidental, and the mutations that cause the biological form changes are still accidental, the process of evolution is not accidental because the Richard Dawkinses, Monroe Strickbergers and G. G. Simpsons of science have invented (in their minds) “cumulative selection” concepts and bowls of letters analogies that can somehow (seemingly by magic) take the accident out of an accidental world just long enough to build the most complex machines in the world, machines that the most intelligent beings in the world cannot themselves build on purpose.

We can, according to the neo-Darwinists, rest assured that accident is not being invoked as the explanation here because no professional, of course, would make such an elementary mistake of claiming an accident could make a complex machine! Their own view, however, hardly justifies this assertion. While they have not claimed that an accidental world can make complex living machines, they have claimed that an accidental world can build a system that can make complex machines. Two things must be noted: the world remains accidental in the neo-Darwinian view even while they claim the process of evolution is not, and yes they have claimed exactly the same ridiculous thing they disavow any professional would ever claim, that an accident can make a sophisticated machine. They just dressed the claim up in slippery jargon, saying the accident first makes a system and the system then makes the machine. Maybe they believe their own self-contradictory contrivances, but you and I should not. Truth be told they have actually claimed both, because the minimum increments of biological change subject to fitness selection have, in reality, turned out to be quite complex. Neo-Darwinists assert that accident can achieve the modules requisite for natural selection to act. They of course deny that the modules are complex, but that just adds an additional error to an already self-contradictory concept.

However, Stephen Jay Gould, in Ever Since Darwin,[181] introduces the concept of “preadaptation” as a creative solution to the lack of intermediates, which seems to imply accident is building the machines of nature because it effectively takes natural selection out of the process. He says that there is no need for intermediate functions to be approved by natural selection because there are no intermediate functions, just intermediate forms. In other words, using Gould’s own example, of a fish’s fin, as the fin of the early fishes evolved towards the limb of the first limbed creature for crawling on land there was nothing with an intermediate function between the two that was required to have developed. The fin just evolved as a fin until it was a limb doing the job of a fin. Then the creature was able to crawl ashore using the limb-like fin.

There are two things wrong with this as a solution to the lack of intermediate forms in the tree of life. First, the later increments of form change that occurred when the fin became more and more like a limb would not have been selected for by natural selection, they would have been selected against. This is because they would not be efficient fins. The second thing wrong with this solution is that the simplistic appendage of a fin, a little scaly flesh stretched over a spine of two of skeletal arm, goes no distance at all toward explaining the evolution of truly complex structures like the brain or the tripartite genetic information system.

What explains all the intermediate steps between a bacterium and a man under this scenario of “preadaptation?” Nothing that I can see. Could a simple limb have evolved by pure accident from a simple fin? Maybe, once the genetic system of the fish was already constructed and in place. But natural selection would not have assisted in this; the change would have to be pure accident. The neo-Darwinists can’t have it both ways. Either their theory of evolution is geared around natural selection or it is not. Taking natural selection out of the process like this example does will not avail them of proof of neo-Darwinian evolution at all. It only shows the simplistic limits of a truly accidental process: small changes after the hard part of creating a living creature is already done.

Revelations of modern genetic science and biochemistry have since pulled the plug on this neo-Darwinian fantasy trip by showing that the smallest selectable component of cellular and other systems in living organisms is as often as not too complex for an accident to build. There may be a few simple selectable form and function enhancements, but not many. A color change in a moth, perhaps. Overall change in length for a shark, possibly. But to create and integrate an internal functional change that must interact with complex organs and systems that is big enough to affect survival or reproductive fitness, no. In a mammal this requires several genes, many proteins and often wholly new cell types, along with corresponding changes to epigenetic system driven physical structures like microtubules. For all this to be developed and integrated in a time synchronized way is beyond the reach of an accident. This is why Richard Dawkins’ “cumulative selection” fails to save the accidental world theory. The small selectable changes his theory depends upon are inadequate to build most selectable biological components. Selectable change is almost always far more complex.

There are four good evidential reasons to consider the classic Darwinian model of gradualism (accumulated small random changes) defeated (five, if you count the incontrovertible evidence for punctuated equilibrium). In contravention of the normal practice of good science, neo-Darwinists ignore the fact that we are now seeing all four of these reasons (plus punctuated equilibrium) as clear trends in the current evidence.

The first trend is that only microevolutions corresponding to very simple biochemical changes are seen in the directly observable evidence. Almost all of these are in bacteria. Nor are these seen to add up to anything. Accumulations of multiple small changes are not seen to lead to even complex microevolutions. Forget macroevolutions: the evolution of one type of creature into another has never been observed or demonstrated.

The second trend is that we are not seeing the creation/configuration of substantial increments of new complex meaningful biological information in mutation studies, which suggests, in close conformance with probability theory, that accidental mechanisms are not responsible for the genome.

The third trend in the evidence is that the microevolutions science has so far observed have not required the integration of any complex new feature or functionality into a complex subsystem. Longer wing, sleeker torso, shorter beak, overall size change, color change, a single bacterial enzyme change that functions as a defense mechanism outside the organism, other simple changes affecting only the organism’s external environment, etc., these are the only “evolutions” we have observed to have occurred. There is a clear pattern and message in those observations: a complexity barrier exists beyond which accident cannot go.

Finally, from the perspective of the central question of how to originate radically new body types and different types of creatures, what we have seen in observed variations are evolutionary dead ends. We may be able to trace them through several branches of the tree of life. We may show how they have been altered over time to do slightly different functions, through epochs perhaps. But we cannot establish that any of these observed variations, singly or in combination, have lead to macroevolution. Where we have strong suspicions the processes involved hardly qualify as accidental. We don’t know what has generated macroevolution. We can pretty much deduce that the Hox genes,[182] the transpositional elements, and other parts of the developmental genome are somehow responsible, probably acting in close concert. We certainly do not know that an accident could work through these complex mechanisms to make one type of creature out of another in the real world in real evolutionary time. We do know that the process is horrendously complex, and that it requires the synchronization of many complex component processes.

The current mode of evolutionary explanation, by assuming the existence of complex genomes with transpositional capabilities before the explanation even begins, is not a true explanation of the origin and development of life, not in the sense that laymen and philosophers seek an explanation (the sense that you and I seek an explanation). Such explanations are only relevant to the technical explanation of the processes of life’s later development after the hard part of originating the genomes is done. Even then, the neo-Darwinist kind of “explanation,” such as Ernst Mayr gives of peripatric speciation based macroevolution[183] and Stephen Jay Gould gives of punctuated equilibrium, are fully abstract theoretical statements tied to no specific biochemical chain of events whatsoever (beyond Mendelian genetics and population studies). They do have varying levels of support from frequently hypothetical statistical population projections and fossil locations on a changing tree of life constructed under the assumption of accidental evolution. Such explanations are useful to science in portraying mechanisms for inherited variations, but for little else.

To ascribe the occurrence of evolution to some biomechanically unknown means is not to explain, but merely to observe and describe, and then only at a superficial level. Scientists may well be doing their best to discover the biochemical pathways, but until they do we are still minus an explanation. We won’t know how far the process is predetermined in its results, how far it is guided and directed, or to what extent randomness enters the equation. The much vaunted explanatory power of evolutionary theory remains a complete fiction minus the biomechanics to back it up. It is no mystery as to why neo-Darwinists keep their theory in the abstract where it cannot be tested, however. The past theories of evolution that were formulated concretely enough to make testable predictions have all been refuted!

If the steps in the evolutionary chain were so truly simple that an accident could produce them, science would have no trouble replicating substantial sequences of those steps of evolution in the lab—but this absolutely cannot be done. Steps so simple that an accident could achieve them would not take great lengths of time to be accomplished and therefore should have been observed, and observed in sets that, at least at times, added up to selectable levels of progressive form change involving complex internal functions and systems. This has never been seen. One may therefore conclude that accident is not the driving force of the form change proposals that have built the tree of life.

In the best of current neo-Darwinian research, the biomechanical steps of evolution that are allegedly first selected and preserved by natural selection and then accumulate to form macroevolutionary advances reside solely in the academically (and too often politically) informed imagination of the researcher. There is no evidence that the small evolutionary changes we have actually observed would link to form different types of creatures. I do not point this out by way of asserting that evolution did not occur; it apparently did occur. Rather, I am warning against politicized overstatements about what we actually know concerning evolution, overstatements that go well beyond the bounds of good science.

Neo-Darwinists have felt comfortable using accident as the unproven default explanation because the only alternative was felt to be God, an alternative not tractable to science. Now that intelligent design theory has proposed an alternative that both fits the evidence closely and is scientifically tractable, there is no reason to defer to a default explanation that otherwise has no support. With intelligent design theory we can accept the punctuated fossil record with its large jumps as it is without having to constantly hedge about (millions) of critical missing links. With ID theory we can explain life’s origin and development, not just look at the historical course of fossils and say “There it is; there’s your explanation. That’s the way it happened.” Description is necessary and invaluable, but it shouldn’t be confused with causal explanation.

How can I be so caustic about the dearth of support for classic Darwinian theory when our late and much beloved Pope John Paul II himself has said that “evolution” is “more than a theory.” The Pope did not call evolution an absolute fact, however, nor did he specify a given version, which suggests he meant only basic evolution, descent with modification, with the mechanism being unspecified. On the other hand the Pope explicitly ruled out the accidental and materialistic versions of evolution. Unfortunately, His Holiness’ comments were often misconstrued by the neo-Darwinists who apparently do not know that there is plenty of corroborative ground between “more than a theory” and “established fact.” The category of scientific axiom, specifically, lies between the two. For example, a generalized concept of evolution has come to be a veritable axiom of science in the same way as thermodynamic law or Einstein’s relativity theory is an axiom. Einstein felt thermodynamic law to be so well-established that it would be the last of our natural laws that would ever be refuted. Nonetheless, it can in theory be refuted, and must be refutable to be scientific. Thus evolutionary theory too can be refuted.

Our Pope was not therefore saying that evolution was an established fact that could never be refuted (nothing in science holds this exalted status), but that evolution has advanced to the stage of being a fundamental axiom of science. At this point, much like the situation with thermodynamic law, if evolution goes a very large chunk of our scientific theoretical base goes with it because it has all been intricately interwoven. We now have the subdisciplines of evolutionary psychology, sociobiology and many others.[184] Other primary disciplines of science have implemented evolutionary models at points as well. That does not mean that future evidence would never entail a radical rework of our conceptual framework; it could happen. It would be less than a catastrophe for explanation, of course, if such a rework were to occur to the effect that randomness was removed as the ultimate foundation and directional processes put in its place.

Certainly, we could live with the loss of accidental evolution a whole lot easier than if we were to lose thermodynamic law, which probably tells us there is a major difference in the veracity of the two theories. Evolution is “more than a theory,” then, only in this axiomatic sense that much past and ongoing research, study, analysis, and theorizing is now predicated upon the truth of one kind of evolutionary concept or the other. There would be a high intellectual cost entailed in letting all of the evolutionary models go, yes, that is, the true ones along with the false ones. But the implementation of intelligent design does not require such a thing. ID theory only requires that the evolutionary models we retain match the evidence, and that they allow for a substantially directed and in part predetermined process, one that substitutes causation for accident and thereby increases the overall explanatory quality of evolutionary science. Thus, when Pope John Paul II said that evolution was more than a theory he was not implying that it was an indispensable, irrefutable, fact, but rather, that it was an institutionally entrenched scientific axiom, one that we could yet let go of, but only at the cost of a major rework of many theoretical models in the several disciplines.

Adding the tenet of intelligent design to the basic theory of evolution entails no intellectual cost beyond some hours of rewriting in the scientific books and journals. ID, in fact, eliminates the current onerous intellectual cost, the embarrassment really, of holding to the ridiculous claim that an accident can make the most sophisticated machines known to man. The neo-Darwinists’ compulsive refusal to let go of the theory of accidental evolution in the face of overwhelming evidence against it has become a genuine scandal in science.

Given the many and enormous biochemical obstacles to macroevolution of the entire tree of life from a single ancestor that are already known to science, all sorts of radical variations on the classic neo-Darwinian concept remain possible. Alternative views might involve multiple independent origins of life with many major discontinuities in the trunk and branches of the tree of life. Some of these alternatives might entail a view of the development of life so different from the classical theories of evolution that we might be reticent to call them evolution at all, yet they would more closely match the evidence and be more explanatory than the accidental scenario. Intelligent design theory is one such option. ID much more closely matches the modern data than does the classic gradualist accidental conception. Consequently, “evolution” in the way it is commonly thought of by the public and in the classic sense that the neo-Darwinists use the term, cannot be deemed an indisputable fact at all.

There are important problems inherent in entrenching mere assumption into science as if it were a fact and then, upon that basis alone, virtually locking competing theories out of the research community. Such a tact consciously avoids encountering situations that might genuinely refute the classic theory (and certainly would refute the accidental tenet).

Contrary to what we are now doing in science, among all the other legitimate questions we should also be looking to prove or disprove that microevolution can lead to macroevolution via accidental mutations, not simply assuming it. We should then encounter situations, should they exist, that demonstrate that accumulated accidentally spawned microevolutions typically do not chain to produce macroevolution, but rather that macroevolution is an event of a wholly different kind produced by entirely different and more complex mechanisms (perhaps a convergence of several separate mechanisms). Bottlenecks, obstacles, quantifiably unachievable magnitudes, and apparent biomechanical impossibilities, all these would all be revealed and documented in a rigorously controlled and peer-reviewed scientific setting. Then, one way or the other, we would have a properly scientific foundation to evolutionary theory.

In contrast, at the present time we only have personal philosophical preferences masquerading as science. True, most studies follow experimental controls and protocols well enough to be called science in microcosm, but stepping back from the specific study and looking at general research strategies, funding constraints, and theoretical assumptions reveals that we are not doing proper science at those levels. What should be an unbiased search and discovery operation is really just an ongoing list of opportunities to further elucidate and, if possible, confirm one single theoretical alternative: accidental evolution (or a very quiet form of noncommittal evolution, so quiet the public will not alert to the difference).

Darwin’s own criterion for the refutation of his theory essentially means that if it could be shown that microevolution cannot lead to macroevolution via a series of small random variations at any known point in the development of the tree of life his theory would break down; it would be refuted. Thus, in avoiding a proper search for these refuting instances through merely assuming their absence, neo-Darwinists have rigged the game. By agreement no one ever looks to test the very criterion for failure that Darwin himself established. The integrity of science is lost in such a procedure, and political bias is implied.

If neo-Darwinian theory is not true, evidence against it is likely to appear quite quickly in the investigation of the bridge between micro and macroevolution because large scale evolution is the hard part. However, even if the theory of basic evolution is true, the thesis is so enormous in scope that it would take centuries of work to establish the biomechanics of the process once we began seriously studying the bridge between micro and macroevolution. In the short term, therefore, that is, within the lives of current scientists, the theory they have vested their reputations in only stands to be disconfirmed/refuted, it cannot be confirmed until long outside of their lifetimes, if at all. The tact of ignoring the bridge between micro and macroevolution is therefore politically suspect because it will tend to benefit only the proponents of neo-Darwinian/basic evolution and not their critics.

Homology, however one chooses to define it (scientists don’t all agree upon its definition), although the mainstay of the evolutionary argument, does not in and of itself constitute a bridge between micro and macroevolution. Homology marks the position of some of the planks, but does not provide the biochemical route between them. Similarly, inheritance explains the achievement of what creatures have in common but it does not explain the achievement of new complex functions and features. Thus, we have so far not explained macroevolution so much as merely noted that it has occurred.

Homology, in the most general sense is similarity. This might be similarity of structural patterns, similar (not necessarily identical) genetic sequences, common cellular processes, common developmental processes, common anything really, any scientifically traceable case for inheritance with modification that can relate otherwise substantially dissimilar structures in different creatures.[185] Homology does strongly suggest generic evolution, though it does not prove it. Homology, of course, is fully compatible with intelligent design. The classic example of homology, the pentadactyl (five pronged) limb, provides a beneficial, if not optimal, skeletal structure for hands, feet, wings and fins and is therefore logical for an intelligent designer to use across a span of bioengineering applications that perform similar tasks.

Neo-Darwinists feel that a living biological inheritance is necessary to explain the substantial similarities observed among very disparate creatures.[186] In other words, they feel it would be too improbable that such complex similarities could be achieved through independent multiple routes by accident.☺ This could well be true, but the reader should by now recognize that their reasoning is the identical logic of the intelligent design probability argument, which Darwinists dismiss out of hand only when used by their opposition! They can’t have it both ways. Inheritance is a likely explanation of homology, but arguing in this way, from probabilities, also corroborates the probability argument for intelligent design. If accident can’t achieve part of the tree of life, how can it achieve all of it?

Darwinists will inevitably object here that the probability argument is only an argument against accident, an argument they now concede not only prevails, but is one any fool would acknowledge. They assert, however, that the probability argument is not an argument for intelligent design. The success of this objection fully hinges upon their posing a coherent and well-evidenced third alternative to chance and intelligent design, an alternative that can account for the design and assembly of complex biological machines. The alternative Dawkins gives, of course, is “cumulative selection.” Dawkins’ model is refuted by modern genetics and biochemistry which say that accident cannot compose anything substantial enough for natural selection to select upon. The alternative proposed by evolutionists like G. G. Simpson and Monroe Strickberger, a bowl full of adaptive combinations that increasingly facilitate the progressive course of evolution, is not an alternative explanation because it is not an explanation at all. It simply says nature became increasingly good at building living machines over time; it doesn’t say how or why. However, a machine-building machine is more of an argument for intelligent design than for accident. They are probably assuming Dawkins’ “cumulative selection” as the hidden mechanism. Since “cumulative selection” fails in light of modern biochemistry, if their event process model is to have a plausible foundation at all it must lie in self-organization. But it is still a machine-building machine that they say is being self-organized. They seem to think no further explanation is called for, but if we feel obliged to explain the mechanisms of life in the first place, and have spent trillions of dollars and hours pursuing it, why don’t we feel similarly obliged to explain a nature-wide machine that is at least as complex as the living machines it has built?

The order of the main groups in the fossil record does reflect a progression from the simple to the complex, although it is not a universal theme in each line of development. However, this hardly refutes intelligent design, as the logical sequence of building algae and simple plants first in order to produce the oxygen-rich atmosphere needed for complex animal life makes as much sense for intelligence as for an accident. Most of the machines humans put together (by intelligent design) are done the same way, in logical steps or modular increments moving from the simple to the complex. Indeed, it can hardly be done any other way, as the simple subcomponent systems have to be complete before they are locked into the larger machine. A simple to complex approach in system design is often, if not always, the approach that an intelligent designer takes. This is done for good reasons of efficiency. Accident, however, does not proceed in such a way, but, rather, haphazardly, having no consistency in its approach, and no efficiency whatsoever. Accident never achieves highly complex functional machinery. Machinists and engineers say “It was an accident!” when they fail, not when they succeed.

Appendix 2 to this book argues in terms of numbers a principle we already know from direct experience: an accidental process is wasteful. To illustrate this, let the reader suppose for a moment that he or she is an art student. We have all been there, if only in kindergarten, with mixed success. One sits down to paint or to do origami, Japanese paper cutting. The instructor then tells you to make eight hierarchically embedded levels of design in the art. The first level must have 3,000,000,000 attributes (corresponding to the human genome), and the others several millions each. The eight levels correspond to the minimum vertically integrated levels of complexity of a living animal’s biological system design: genetic, cellular subsystem, cellular, organ, tissue, body wide systems such as the respiratory and circulatory systems, body parts, and the total body plan. How many sheets of paper will go into the trashcan before you meet the instructor’s specifications? Given infinite time and resources, might you do it? Maybe, maybe not. Given finite time and finite resources? The question then becomes, “Well, how much time and how much resources?” What if the instructor wants the project turned in before class lets out? Now, have the instructor tell you to do the same project blindfolded without aide of memory and with no preconceived design concept. Just keep trying until you inadvertently hit upon it. How many more materials will be wasted prior to success? There aren’t that many “sheets of paper” available in the history of the universe.

The assumption that all the biochemical steps in the enormous evolutionary chain can be accomplished by accident is similarly unreasonable. The lack of a demonstration of those steps by science certainly reflects the fact that they cannot in fact be demonstrated. The biomechanical trail of evolution may not be missing from modern science for the sole reason that it is neither a simple nor a small job—the steps might be missing because it is an impossible job, not in theory given infinite time, but in fact within the time and resources available. If accident could achieve the steps of evolution, however, they would have to be both simple and small, so simple and small in fact that it would be child’s play for our best scientific minds to replicate those steps in the laboratory.

Three examples of “reasonably complete” fossil sequences spanning the hypothesized developmental distance between a reptile and an early mammal, between land mammals and whales, and between ancient man and modern man are given in Mayr’s book, What Evolution Is.[187] Futuyma similarly depicts the sequence from reptile to mammal and touts it as the most beautifully fully documented example of a major taxon.[188] The main intermediates between the modern horse and its ancestors are likewise well known. Granting for the sake of discussion that these evolutions did occur, these fossil sequences do not mark the process as accidental as required by neo-Darwinian theory. The fossil record does not portray a process predominantly haphazard or inefficient. Quite the opposite, the fossil record reflects a minimum of steps, all going straight to the goal, with few blunders such as a random process must certainly produce, and frequent great leaps involving an enormous span of biochemical change that remains to be accounted for between steps.

If we stick to the evidence we are stuck with unexplainable gaps, the traversing of which is as difficult as the origin of the first life form itself—some arguably more so. The first living cell had no more than 300,000 to 500,000 base pairs of DNA, the configuration of which, along with the achievement of a closely matching translation system (Barbieri’s ribotype) is the harder part of the process. Reasonably plausible hypotheses have been proposed for spontaneous construction of the gross features of the earliest cells (minus the configuration of the biological information in RNA/DNA) such as the clay substrata theory. These imaginary scenarios show a possible route for the first cellular components to have been captured in near proximity and maintained in a viable state while stuck to a moist clay substrata. The essential raw chemical ingredients of life may thus have been held in place long enough for a cell wall to form around them.[189] But this is not the hard part of originating life. Neither is the spontaneous manufacture of short strings of nucleotides in a rudimentary RNA the hard part. The hard part is a tripartite task: meaningful configuration of vast amounts of DNA, the construction of a “translation” (transcription) and regulatory system at least as complex as the genome itself, and additional assembly instructions in epigenetic and other forms that drive the physical assembly of structures. All of this must eventually come to be in the same place and time for the achievement of modern living cells.

Throwing a few chemical compounds together to get a handful of amino acids as is currently described in origins of life research hardly compares to the enormity of the task of coding and translating biological information for the entire tree of life in a multileveled time synchronized hierarchy of sophisticated biological machines moving within machines. Distinguished Italian scientist, Marcello Barbieri, explains in his fascinating new book, The Organic Codes, that a code system requires not only the text of the message being sent, but a translation mechanism.[190] The translation system must be at least as complex as the message. In living organisms the primary components of the DNA translation system are messenger RNA, transfer RNA, ribosomes and a complex system of enzymes. Finally, as we mentioned early on, citing Professor Scott Minnich of the University of Idaho, the assembly instructions for cellular machines are even more complex than the protein coding instructions. Assembly has to take place in real time in moving systems in three dimensions. Therefore an unimaginably complex set of information must exist in order to express physical-temporal control of this construction extravaganza. There lies the complexity and the difficulty level. It is beyond anything our own intelligence can currently imagine. It is so far beyond the reach of an accident that an unbiased rational thinker must simply dismiss the thought.

Coding of complex biological information of several kinds, that is, information plus translation plus construction in three dimensions plus time, not just two dimensional information, is, therefore, the real problem an accidental process must overcome. It is the central explanatory task of evolutionary theory. In starting their theoretical models of evolution in the middle of the history of life after the genomes are present, that is, after this central problem has already been solved, Darwinists are not explaining life; they are only explaining to what extent the design of life permits variation after it is first constructed.

In the face of this vast complexity, what do all the observed mutations add up to: nothing. They are trivial minutia compared to the task of explaining the development of the tree of life. Nor can any of the currently hypothesized mutational mechanisms be definitively shown to produce progressive and viable biological form change leading to macroevolution. We are probably on the verge of such a demonstration with the transpositional mechanisms.[191] But those systems are hugely complex and very little about such a complex mechanism internally constrained within another complex mechanism (the genome) within another complex mechanism (the organism) can be considered accidental. There must be a mechanism of life’s development, of course, assuming supernatural intervention has not occurred at intermediate points in the process, but science is pulling your leg when they tell you they currently “know” what that mechanism is.

The ability of an accidental process to make new genes from scratch is not something science has proven or demonstrated, it is merely an unevidenced assumption, an assumption refuted by absolutely everything else we know in science, mathematics, logic, common sense, and experimental work in the laboratory. Making an entire self-transpositional genome that does not self-destruct and which consistently generates progressive evolution is exponentially more difficult. Within certain limits, random changes may be able to mutate one meaningful gene into something closely similar, but that does not explain the creation of the totality of the original genomes, a task trillions upon trillions of times more complex and difficult.

The problem of how to create substantial magnitudes of complex biological information by chance does not occur only once at the origin of life. Accidentally constructing a bacterium does not solve the problem of how to originate the biological information needed by plants, mammals, reptiles, birds etc. Bacteria have only 500-7,500 genes, multi-cellular creatures have ~13,000 genes, higher plants some 25,000 genes, and mammals approximately 40,000 genes.[192] The same problem of how to accidentally originate complex biological information is encountered many times in the evolution/creation of life, as new biological information is needed that does not presently exist and at levels of complexity far beyond those required to generate the first simple organism. Honestly viewed, the so-called well-established tree of life is a tree of mysteries each as confounding as the origins of the first living cell from inorganic matter.

C. R. C. Paul does not tell us how to interpret the fossil record, but he does remind us to stick to it. At this point, what we see on the tree of life may, in general terms, be pretty much what happened. In that case, we have heavily “punctuated equilibrium,” not gradualism at all, with many large jumps between radically different creatures that an accidental process cannot explain.

As late as 2002 the best direct examples neo-Darwinists could present for even generic evolution were related types of flies interbreeding on a common food source to produce a new race within the same species, another fly’s wing length changing in response to climate related selection pressures, and a fish becoming slimmer to enhance access to a specific food source.[193] The origination of complex new genetic information and integration of complex new functions into internal mechanisms was not involved in any of these events. The neo-Darwinists have taken these simple microevolutions, events that in fact portray the limits of accidental mutations, and used them as an argument that there are no limits. Nothing could be more ridiculous.

Niles Eldredge and company will cry foul, of course, claiming I have grossly understated the case for evolution. They will cite tons upon tons of “nested similarities” all tidily bound up in a professional looking chart. They will cite common genetic sequences that just keep on coming, data that real experts “know” proves evolution beyond any doubt. While granting that the accumulated data certainly represents a lot of hard work by dedicated researchers, and that basic evolution may well be a fact, this category of evidence, as voluminous as it may be, is not logically supportive of an accidental process. Nor does it show a complete viable biomechanical trail between any two radically divergent species.

The hypothetical tree of life Darwinists have constructed by tracing such similarities combined with phylogenetic inferences (educated guesses) are, I confess, a good bet to be the actual path evolution took. It does not, however, tell us how those steps were biomechanically achieved. We cannot replicate these jumps in the laboratory and we cannot describe the biochemical steps needed to make the jumps. They are therefore not so simple as to be the product of an accident.

Even inheritance is not established with certainty by nested similarities, or homologies. A similar chart of functional, structural and compositional similarities can be drawn between a dump truck, an army tank, a fork lift, a bulldozer and a school bus, but inheritance is not the origin of those similarities. The similarities in these vehicles originated in the minds of intelligent designers who, while having somewhat different purposes, are nonetheless heavily constrained in their design options by the physical necessity of their vehicles all having to do some of the same tasks on the same planet, and perhaps in the practical wisdom of not trying to reinvent the wheel when one is ready to hand.

Even with such a profusion of similarities as has now been amassed in evolutionary research, minus a complete biochemical pathway between (non-imaginary) species laid out for inspection there is no way of finally validating the intermediates as intermediates. Sufficient data is missing to allow a real possibility of refutation based upon a subsequent biochemical demonstration that achievement of a specific evolutionary route is physically impossible in the available time. To finally validate a proposed evolutionary route we must establish that a proposed chain of variations is feasible from all the separate points of view of biomechanics, natural selection, time, and physical resource availability. What were the steps? Would each of the innovations constitute a true advantage to the source creature? Would biochemical affinities and natural laws have permitted such a path within the time and physical resources available? These questions have not been answered for the steps of the hypothetical tree of life that evolutionists have constructed through phylogenetic inference.

Many of life’s creatures appear to have a lot of genetic content and functional design characteristics in common, true. That’s what the evidence says, but that’s all it says. It says nothing about the origin and development of life being fully grounded in accident, and although I personally find the argument for inheritance convincing, it is not, strictly speaking, an entailment from the evidence. In the meantime the illusion that has been permitted to be perpetuated by our scientific establishment that the evidence incontrovertibly establishes an accidental process as the basis for the origin and development of life is revealed to be both false and a true scandal in science.

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